


The Secret Garden

by thor20



Series: The Children Of Sylvain [3]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast), The Adventure Zone: Amnesty - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Friends to Enemies, Friends to Pining, Gen, Minor Character Death, Not Canon Compliant, Not TAZ Amnesty: Arc 4 Compliant, Other, ask to tag, time to play minor-character "it's free real estate"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-06-04
Packaged: 2020-03-02 20:40:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 43,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18818608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thor20/pseuds/thor20
Summary: Hollis- ˈhä -lis: Transferred use of the English surname meaning "dweller at the holly trees." It is derived from the Old Englishholegn(holly tree).Holly- ˈhä-lē,noun: any of a genus (Ilex of the family Aquifoliaceae, the holly family) of trees and shrubs,especially either of two (I. opaca of the eastern U.S. and I. aquifolium of Eurasia) with spiny-margined evergreen leaves and usually red berries often used for Christmas decorations. In Victorian flower language, holly flowers mean defense and protection, and, less commonly, hope.---Hollis has many, many questions about the woods they grew up in. They just want to know what's out there; they always have. They see teeth gleaming in the shadows; sometimes, late at night, they hear mournful howls on the wind, or the cries of dying beasts. Kepler is dangerous. Theforestis dangerous. (And sometimes they think they can hear it speaking to them. But that's ridiculous. Isn't it?)Hollis doesn't know how, or why, and there's only so many questions they can ask. But they're willing to give almost anything to find out the answers.





	1. From The Earth

_Kepler, West Virginia_

_December 24, 1995_

_10:03 p.m._

_“Hit the deck,_ hit the deck! _Leo!”_

_There were gunshots in the howling wind. Leo dropped to his stomach as fast as he could, as Victoria’s bullets flew over his head. They clipped its shoulder. The beast in front of them staggered back; it touched the wound gingerly, then whipped its hand away and roared. He could feel the ground shake under him and shivered._

_Someone vaulted over him and ran right for the Krampus, in all its hairy, horned, snaggle-toothed and blood-soaked glory. He heard Andrew shout, “Liv -”_

_“I got it, babe!” Liv yelled back. She skidded on the snow and dug her heels in, ripping off her gloves to get at her ring. Her wedding ring._

_The walkie-talkie on Leo’s belt crackled._ “Leo, get up!” _said a voice._ “Get your sword, get up, now -”

_He was new to this, at least in Kepler. The Pine Guard did things different than Leo’s First Liners in Manhattan, which was more… scattered. Less organized. Less precise. The walkie-talkies were especially new; apparently they had a future-seer on their team, and he gave them heads-ups on changing visions and shifting winds. The First Liners didn’t have that kind of luxury. So it almost didn’t register to Leo that he was calling his name for a reason. Leo gritted his teeth and pulled himself into a sitting position. God, his bones hurt._

_Liv pulled off her wedding ring._

_Before him, suddenly, there was an explosion of branches and spring-green waxy leaves, almost alien in the blizzard around him. Liv stood before the Krampus, solid and steadfast, her body the thick gnarled wood of a tree Leo felt like he should be able to name, her hair a long tangle of its leaves. She flung her arms into the air, and they lengthened and sprouted into writhing branches._

“Leo, get up! Six seconds, fuck, go go go!” _barked the voice of Indrid Cold, and Leo scrambled to his feet. His sword was a bar of ice in his hand, chilling his fingers to the bone. Liv leapt forward and wrapped her branches around the Krampus’s arms, pinning them to its body. The branches lengthened and kept wrapping around._

_“I’m out of ammo,” Victoria spat. “Drew, it’s on you!”_

“Someone keep its arms down!” _crackled the walkie-talkies. Indrid was sounding panicked, now, and that made Leo’s stomach lurch like he’d eaten a bad burrito. In his short time knowing the man, he had almost never heard him break his calm, affably cool composure. Now, Indrid was scared out of his skin._

_Drew lifted his shotgun, aimed, and fired._

_One of the Krampus’s eyes exploded in a gruesome red cloud. It bellowed in pain, thrashing around and trying to escape Liv’s grip; from where she was perched on its broad, muscled back, it looked like she was barely holding on. She tried to tighten her branch-arms around it -_

_“Drew, one more!” Madeline yelled across the circle. Through the walkie-talkie, Indrid was screaming something that was quickly stolen by the wind._

_The Krampus wrenched its arms away from its body._

_It sounded as if the very air had been torn in half - a great ripping sound, a brief wail of pain, and then silence. Shards of wood and waxy green leaves flew everywhere, bouncing off the trees, impaling the snow. A golden ring soared across the clearing and landed in the snow at Barclay’s feet. Twigs and leaves fluttered down like a second snowstorm, and the sharp tang of olives floated in the wind - Leo stopped himself before he could breathe in, because that was Liv’s blood he was smelling, that was_ Liv’s blood -

_“No!” Drew screamed, firing again. The shot went wide and embedded itself in a tree. The Krampus’s horned head jerked towards the noise; it roared -_

“Leo!” _yelled Indrid._

_“On it,” Leo said, and lunged forward, sword raised in his right hand._

_It saw him coming. Leo felt a furry, clawed hand seize his wrist, and his blood ran cold as the snow around them. He tried to jerk his arm away, but the Krampus just tightened its grip like a vise, until he felt the bones in his arm shift. Before he could react, it opened its mouth and bit right through his elbow._

_In all his years of monster-hunting, he’d never felt pain like this. Never. Leo Tarkesian slumped to the ground, out cold. There were blood and olive leaves on the ice-crusted snow. Just before he went under, he heard Drew’s panicked screams echoing in his ears._

* * *

_“Stay down, Leo. You - no, don’t -”_

_“He’s awake, just let him -”_

_“He lost his fucking arm, he shouldn’t be -”_

_“What’s going on?”_

_“Shh!”_

_“Sorry -”_

_“Liv.”_

_Leo’s voice cut through the silence. Everyone shut up, as Leo stirred in his the bed._

_“Where’s… where’s Liv?” His voice was hoarse and thin, like someone had used his vocal cords as guitar strings for a week straight. “And Drew? Are they - are they okay?”_

_At the foot of the bed, Indrid Cold folded his arms and grimaced, looking away. He looked like a rumpled mess: his button-up was undone, thrown over a stained green T-shirt, and he’d swapped out his suit pants for old jeans._

_“Where are - guys, where they?”_

_“They didn’t make it,” Madeline said softly, from her chair at the right of Leo’s bed. Victoria stood over by the window, at the opposite side of the room; she stared out the window, unblinking._

_“Oh, God,” Leo said faintly. He slumped back onto the pillows, staring up at the ceiling of his room in the Lodge. The space where his arm had been, now missing from the elbow down, was like a black hole. Nobody could look at it for more than a second._

_“But the kids,” he whispered. “What’s going to happen to the kids?”_

_“They can stay here -”_

_“No.”_

_Victoria’s voice sliced through the room like a machete. Everyone cringed. Madeline looked up, eyebrows raised, and said, “What -”_

_“He was my brother,” Victoria said. At last she turned away from the window, and her eyes were flashing with barely-restrained rage. “He was my blood. And now, thanks to - thanks to what happened, they’re dead. That Krampus got too fuckin’ close to the Lodge, and we paid the price with their lives. Okay? I’m not lettin’ their kids stay anywhere near this place, as long as that gate’s still in the woods out back.”_

_“Victoria,” Barclay said nervously, “they’re - we can keep them safe -”_

_“Tell that to Olivia’s body, Barclay,” Victoria snapped. “Y’all didn’t even pick up what was left of her corpse.”_

_“In my defense,” Leo said feebly, raising the stump of his arm. “I was bleedin’ out. You guys had to take care of that.”_

_Victoria opened her mouth, but Indrid beat her to the punch. “Victoria, they’re half-Sylvan,” he said bluntly. “Olivia was a dryad. It’s almost a guarantee that they inherited some of her powers, if not all, and they need to know what… they just. They just need to know what they’re capable of.”_

_Victoria stared at Indrid for a long, tense moment, her mouth open. Everyone watched the two tensely, as if there was about to be an explosion - and in a way, there was, because it was plain as day that Indrid knew what her response would be. His mouth twisted in a painful grimace, and he looked away._

_“No,” she said softly. Indrid nodded once. “They’re my brother’s children. You couldn’t protect my brother. You couldn’t protect my sister-in-law. You can’t protect them. They’re gonna stay with me, and they’re gonna fuckin’ live.”_

_“And you can take care of them?” Barclay said in the corner, eyebrows raised. “You - you’re sure? We’d be more’n willing to help, Vicky. One’s just four months old, babies are tough to take care of -”_

_“Hollis.”_

_A muscle twitched in Victoria’s jaw. “The baby’s name,” she said, each word slow and deadly, “is Hollis. The girl’s name is Pigeon. Drew and Liv named them that way, and by God you’re gonna speak their names. They’re my family. And they’re both coming home with me, Barclay. I’m not leavin’ them here in danger, with you.”_

* * *

Hollis always told new recruits to follow the ass.

It wasn't too hard to find it, to be honest. Cross the parking lot by the Hornets’ Nest, dodge the pothole in the eastbound lane, walk a little bit into the trees, and you'd see it in all its glory: one garden gnome - or perhaps a dwarf - in a onesie with the butt flap undone, mooning a barely-visible path between two trees.

Follow the ass, huh. It wasn't like they had any other choice.

Hollis walked behind their new recruits, baseball bat in hand and leather jacket zipped up tight, as they went into the woods. They wouldn't use the bat unless they had to. The forest was dangerous at night. They told their recruit to find their own path through the trees - follow where the ass is pointing, man, they weren’t kidding - and if they were right, they’d find the clearing well enough.

In the clearing stood a greenhouse, half-choked by climbing grape vines, dimly lit from the inside with glow sticks and old Christmas lights. They went in. Inside it smelled like earth and rain, a soft, sweet tang of fresh life that sank heavy into the lungs. Hollis flicked the lights on and slowly would between the rows of potted plants, looking them over carefully. Their fingers brushed a tomato plant’s leaves; it was late summer, and the fruit was ripe.

“We have rules for this place,” Hollis said quietly, plucking a ripe tomato. They glanced at their recruit and tilted their head towards the back. “The list’s pinned up there. But you won't need it, after a while.”

Hollis and the recruit headed for a cabinet at the back of the greenhouse - and sure enough, a list was tacked up on the front of the door: something about plant what you take, eat what you plant. Live, Laugh, Light It Up - _Outside_ , with a snuffed-out cigarette painted next to it, still smoking. There was no time to read it all, though; Hollis pulled the creaking door open and held it open, like a magician pulling back their cloak to reveal untold secrets.

Packets of seeds; bags of soil; trowels, hand rakes, weeders; old gardening manuals; a stack of notecards, taped to popsicle sticks.

“Pick a seed and a pot,” Hollis said, “and go ham. It’s yours.” They bit into the tomato like an apple, and gestured at the rest of the Hornets' greenhouse. “Make it grow.”

* * *

Hollis always wanted the world to be solid, for once.

Words shifted on the signs and pages they read; their brain hurt when they try to remember things; sometimes it took a while for questions to stick long enough to be answered, as if someone was throwing uncooked spaghetti at a wall. It tripped them up in school, the way words got blended up and churned out in their head. Like they were spinning down an endless drain of drifting letters, in dozens of languages they could never understand. There was a constant hiccup in the code.

It fucking sucked. Needless to say, school was a nightmare and they were so, so glad they’re out of it.

But some knowledge, though, didn't have to be written down. There was the language of the body - _stand at attention, leather jackets tidy, good posture on your bike - fake it ‘til you make it. If you look like you care, you’ll start caring soon enough._ There was the language of the trees - how their roots slashed through the earth and dove deep to hidden springs, and how their branches rustled against each other in the wind. There was the spoken word. That stayed in Hollis’s mind, best of everything.

(Not the language of the trees. Hollis used to think they could hear them talking, once, but that thought quickly faded. Sometimes, though, it felt like their brain was just a glitching translator: trying to take the world and filter it, into a language, a worldview, that they had never seen.)

(Not the language of the trees, though. That was just ridiculous.)

(Wasn’t it?)

* * *

With their Aunt Vicky, there wasn’t much spoken word to go around.

It was rare that she'd talk about their parents. Until the day she died, she kept talk of her brother and his wife under wraps. They never really knew their parents. Pigeon was a couple years older than Hollis, and could remember their mother’s voice and their father’s face, but it was more… impressions. Nothing concrete they could pass to their sibling. As time went on, the old world swapped out for the new, more and more slipped away, and their life just… was what it was. Them, Pigeon, and their Aunt Vicky, in the dusty old house on the outskirts of town.

Sometimes, Hollis wasn't even sure that their parents had existed. It was ironic how Aunt Vicky kept her old museum open, until Ned Chicane came by and overhauled the place in 2013, because she wanted Kepler to “know what was out there.” Hollis never believed in that, themselves. Especially since the education policy seemed to stop right in its tracks when it came to them and Pigeon.

But when she did talk about them, part of her seemed to come alive. Her bad hip didn't seem to bother her as much, her cough seemed less painful. Her eyes lit up. Andrew and Olivia, she said, her voice like the honeyed steam above a cup of tea, and hearing the names burned a path down into Hollis’s heart. Andrew and Olivia, Olivia and Andrew. Olivia had the greenest thumb this side of the Blue Ridge, and the world seemed to come to life under her hands. Andrew loved books and knowledge, but he loved the cantaloupes and tomatoes his wife would grow more than anything. Especially tomatoes.

And they'd died when Hollis was just a baby. Not even four months old. Leaving just them and their sister in their aunt's care, for the rest of their lives.

"How?"

She glanced at Pigeon, her eyes suddenly stony. "What?

They were seven and Pigeon was nine, and their sister had dirt on her knees from working in the garden. "How'd they die?" Pigeon said quietly.

Their aunt's mouth flattened into a cold, thin line, like a knife's edge. "A... disaster," she said. "It was winter. Accidents happened."

* * *

Pigeon and Hollis were Vicky’s kids from the very beginning, it seemed. They grew up in the Cryptonomica, eating their parents’ favorite fruits and vegetables without ever knowing their faces, beyond dusty photographs hanging above the mantle and in photo albums tightly shut in Aunt Vicky's desk. As an infant, Hollis learned to walk, and then to run, down the dusty aisles in the exhibit hall, where Pigeon would play hide and seek with them until they both started sneezing from the dust. The floorboards of the Cryptonomica rang hollow beneath their young feet.

They learned to read by mouthing the words on each placard: _Vampire. Naiad. Flatwoods Monster._ (That last one always took some time to get out. Too many syllables.) _Fairy. Bigfoot. Dryad. Mermaid._

Pigeon would sometimes pull out books on monsters from Aunt Vicky's shelves, and they'd page through them while sitting on the porch. They both liked the pictures. In some of the books, though, the sparse entries in the “K” section were torn out. According to the index, there was supposed to be an entry on the Krampus.

Hollis made the mistake of asking what it was, once. Aunt Vicky did not speak to them for nearly an hour.

Their aunt protected them fiercely, as if she was their own mother. But at times the fierceness became too much. Pigeon perfected the art of sneaking out of the Cryptonomica: the dance across the creaky floorboards, tiptoe here, sidestep there, lift the back doorknob while opening so the hinges wouldn’t creak, keep the doorknob turned so the bolt was pulled back until the door closed. Sometimes Hollis would do that little dance - and sometimes they’d just go straight out the window. Patience wasn’t their strong suit.

In either case, the two of them would spend ages just playing hide and seek by the light of the moon. There were nights when Hollis was the one hiding, but they didn’t even bother to make it tough for their sister; they’d climb up a tree and find a place to sit, and just listen to the wind. Sometimes they thought they could hear voices in the rustling leaves.

Aunt Vicky seemed to grow more vigilant over the years. It was harder for them to sneak out, the older they got - or maybe with age they were just getting clumsier. Whatever the case, there came a sense of guilt whenever the two accidentally woke her. She was getting sicker. Her bad legs made it hard for her to move around some days, and bothered her when she slept. Her cough got worse; the Cryptonomica fell into shambles. All the while, though, she watched out for them, even on days when she couldn’t get out of bed.

Their aunt needed all the help she could get. So Pigeon and Hollis watched themselves a little more carefully, and everyone else in Kepler - knowing how their aunt’s health was starting to tank - watched them, too. It takes a village to raise a child, after all, but it takes a town to raise two, and Kepler more than fit the bill.

Everyone knew their names; everyone saw them running up and down the streets with a soccer ball, or racing grasshoppers, or mock-fighting on the riverbank with sticks like wands or swords. Some of the older residents had known their parents before they died. (One stood behind the counter and absently rubbed his arm above the prosthetic, staring into the depths of his store without seeing it. He always kept the seeds and candy restocked. No kid deserved to lose their parents at Christmas.) Pigeon and Hollis were children of Kepler, too, and Kepler was theirs.

* * *

The two of them had a garden out back of the Cryptonomica in elementary school. It wasn’t much, just a few rows of tilled earth, some trellises and tomato stands, and a whole row of sunflowers along the back fence. It was damn hard to admit it, but money got tighter as they got older, and sometimes it was easier to grow their own food than to buy it. Something about pulling carrots from the ground with their bare hands, too, spoke to Hollis in a way they didn’t understand. It felt complete.

For a while, the garden was Pigeon’s. There was a day in mid-September, though, where Pigeon was studying for a test that she had to do well on. Hollis had one to study for, too, but knew they were going to tank, so why bother? They went out and watered the pumpkins, pulled some weeds, made sure the potato leaves weren’t rotting, and went back in for dinner. Fuck the test.

The next morning, the garden had practically exploded with life.

Hollis stood on the back porch, dumbfounded, and stared for a solid five minutes. As if by magic, the garden had done at least two weeks of growing in just twelve hours: the pumpkins were ripe and round, easily the width of a hubcap, and some quick digging around showed that the potatoes were ready to harvest. Not to mention the sunflowers. Jesus fucking Christ, the sunflowers. They’d shot up nearly three feet.

“Guess it’s official,” Pigeon said thoughtfully, joining them on the back porch. “You’ve got the greenest thumb in Kepler.”

Hollis wanted to laugh. But they saw their aunt looking out the window of the kitchen at the garden, a troubled glint in her eyes, and didn’t.

* * *

Hollis liked knowing things.

They always had. But there was a disconnect, a fucking major one, that the world didn't seem to be willing to fix. It wasn't fair. The world moved in words, signs, cues that they sometimes felt too stupid to understand. If only the world’s knowledge wasn’t locked away in books with words; they liked knowing things, yes, but the world wasn't built in a way that would give them that.

But they would find a way. They’re observant.

They’ve lived in Kepler all their life, and there's only so many facts and figures contained within the walls of their hometown. They knew every street by the time they were seven; they knew every trailhead by the time they were twelve. They knew the difference between a good and a bad tomato, and a good and a bad person. They knew the names of every person in town, and knew their jobs and lives and stories almost better than the others knew themselves. That may have been hubris talking, but Hollis knew enough for their own means.

And sometimes, the knowing was a bit too hard to find, so they chased it.

At fifteen, they knew what it was like to fly - to fly off the Kepler Stunt Club’s wooden ramps on a mountain bike, right into a thicket of trees, and to get acquainted real fast and real fucking hard with the ground again. At fifteen they knew what it was like to get back up again, picking gravel out of their hands, gritting their teeth against the sting, and wheeling back to the ramp for another go. It was up to the moon and luck at this point: at this time of night, none of the stunt club kids would be using the ramps, and Hollis wasn’t one of them - yet. They just had to listen to the trees and trust the moon would be bright enough to light their way.

They knew what it felt like to tighten their helmet strap, look into the trees, and make sudden eye contact with a stranger: some Asian kid, half-hidden in the trees, his dyed-blond hair bright in the shadows like a second sun. He watched Hollis clamber to their feet with a pained, panicked grimace, as if he wasn’t sure if he should run forward to help them or run away to call an ambulance. Or something.

Hollis raised their eyebrows defiantly, blowing their hair out of their face.

Something in their eyes must have scared him, because the guy retreated a bit into the trees, but his eyes were still watchful. Hollis gritted their teeth and wheeled their bike back to the start of the ramps, ready to see if they could stick the jump. The forest roared in their ears, and as they rode their bike down the slope - slicing through the night like a knife - they felt a rumbling in their bones that wasn’t quite their wheels rattling on the earth.

They jumped. They stuck the landing. They skidded to a halt in the gravel, their wheels bumping up against a tree, and whirled around to look at the forest, breathless.

The boy was gone.

Somehow, Hollis knew that they’d meet him again.

* * *

They wheeled their mountain bike back to the Cryptonomica at half past midnight, tired, bruised and sweaty but satisfied. That satisfaction dissolved like cotton candy in water when they saw all the lights on, casting a pale yellow glow on the Cryptonomica’s perpetually-empty parking lot. They swallowed and leaned their bike against the siding, slipping through the door.

Their aunt was sitting at the kitchen table, arms crossed. “Where were you?” she asked, her voice thin. “You - Hollis, oh, God, what happened -”

“Just the woods, Auntie, it’s fine,” Hollis said.

They tried to sound as reassuring as possible, but that didn’t seem to do anything. “The woods?” Aunt Vicky said sharply. “What were you doing out there? Is everything alright -”

“I - took a hard hit on my bike, I wiped out,” Hollis said. They could see Pigeon lurking in the doorway, and their eyes flickered to her. Pigeon raised an eyebrow; they nodded once. _Honest,_ they thought. Pigeon sighed and retreated. “Really, that’s it.”

But Aunt Vicky was looking at them like she didn’t believe a word they’d said. In fact, she just looked scared. “Hollis,” she said faintly. “Hon, please, I know you like bein’ out there in those woods, but it’s not safe.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re scraped up, Hollis, you’re far from fine -”

“It was okay, really!” Hollis said defensively. “I wore a helmet and pads and shit, I’m fine!”

They could feel anger seething in them, something roiling and cold beneath their ribs, and there was a bite in their voice that they couldn’t - didn’t want to - hold back. Aunt Vicky had a white-knuckled grip on the arm of her chair. “Just - that’s - the woods are dangerous,” she said at last. “People have _died_ out there, your _parents_ have died out there -”

“Well, I’m not them.”

Hollis’s voice was shaking. Their aunt looked stunned. “I’m not my parents,” they said, trying to keep their voice even, “I’m not like them, I’m nothing like them, I don’t even fucking _know_ them. No thanks to you,” they added.

They almost immediately regretted their words, because there was a pain in Aunt Vicky’s eyes that they’d never seen before - the deep, bitter pain of knowing too much. But the look in her eyes grated on Hollis, like edges of porcelain jammed together wrong, jagged and grinding - because she knew too much, but Hollis didn’t know enough. Not nearly enough.

And that just made them sick to their stomach - in a desperate drowning way, as if they were a dying plant in a vacuum jar, and the stories Aunt Vicky had never told them was the carbon dioxide they needed. They just wanted to _know,_ for fuck’s sake, that was all they wanted, was to know what was going _on_ -

* * *

Things seemed to change in the blink of an eye.

Hollis stayed out later, and farther, and drifted into the parts of town that Victoria had never liked them being in. Jake - that was his name, _Jake Cool-Ice,_ whipped out fast and anxious like the hand he’d extended when Hollis finally went to a Kepler Stunt Club meeting. Jake seemed a little older than them, in a way Hollis couldn’t put their finger on, but he was such a goofball that he could pass for anything between 16 and 20. It was like the life and glee of a whitewater river had been distilled into his body; when it snowed, he was always out there on Mount Kepler, charging down the black diamond slopes like he’d been born on them.

And sometimes, when Hollis looked at Jake, they caught a flash of shimmering orange in his eyes - but they told themselves it was just a trick of the light.

Hollis liked him. So did Pigeon. The stunt club welcomed them both: Hollis as a participant, Pigeon as a spectator (not to say that she didn’t try the mountain bikes, but that went badly and resulted in some serious property damage). They made friends there. The Cryptonomica was just a flash in the rearview mirror, a place where they’d glance briefly and drift back to at night, before going out into Kepler again to seize the day, the night, the life.

* * *

Sometimes, after a day of stunting and goofing off in the woods, Hollis changed things up.

They’d bring blankets and some pillows to the stunt club meetings in the summer. The others would give them weird looks, but Hollis would just grin at them, set the blankets by the water bottles, and hop on their bike to do tricks. After the meeting was up, most of the club would drift back to Kepler: grab some dinner, patch up any bad scrapes, and head home.

Hollis went the other way, further into the trees. There were places in the woods where roots sloped inwards, forming a cocoon, like a set of cradling arms. Hollis would make a nest of blankets in the roots and curl into it, lulled to sleep by the soft whispers of wind in the trees.

They stopped coming home.

* * *

They didn’t come home for four more years.

* * *

But they weren’t alone. Hollis was never alone. There was their sister, who scraped together enough to buy a secondhand trailer off of Whistle’s lot; they’d sleep out there some nights, when the winter got dark and deep or the forest started to flood from rain. Sometimes they even crashed on their captain’s couch, though his dad always gave them odd looks.

And there were days when Jake would join them under the trees at night.

The first few times he was all awkward and gangling, tripping over tree roots, nervous as a calf separated from the herd - and he was, because he always came alone. The rest of the stunt club had gone to their other haunts or their houses, safe and warm. Fred Owens, their captain, would do his best to haul his older brother Keith back home before dark; their dad was the sheriff, after all, and was a hell of a stickler about curfew. Everyone else tended to follow Fred’s lead on that.

Jake asked, one quiet night after practice while they were both grabbing water bottles and trash and smearing Icy Hot on their sore muscles, “Where do you go?”

Hollis paused, their hand hovering above a Rice Krispies treat wrapper. “Hm?”

Jake gestured vaguely at their pile of blankets. “That’s - a lot,” he said. “Sorry if this is - like, rude or -”

“Yeah, no, don’t worry about it -”

“Sorry - yeah, so… where do you, like. Go?”

To be honest, Hollis never knew how to answer questions like that. They kept things close to their chest, as best they could; having a little mystery in their life was fun, shook up the monotony. But coming from Jake, though - it felt personal, in a way they couldn’t put their finger on.

“Wherever my feet take me,” they said, grinning. Which was true. No lies there. “Though there’s one spot in the trees that I kinda like, out by that old run-down bar -”

“The Little Dipper?”

“Yeah, that one.” Hollis tossed the Rice Krispies treat wrapper into their plastic bag and tied it up, handing it off to Jake. They’d toss the garbage bags in the dumpster out back of Leo’s store, when they got the chance. “There’s a little hollow in the roots there, just enough to curl up in, and I just. Kinda chill there. Sleep there at night. Sometimes - my sister’s got a trailer, now, and sometimes I go hang out there, but… just something about bein’ out here, you know?” they said, waving a hand vaguely at the woods.

“Huh.”

Jake chewed on his lip, staring at a patch of dirt to the right of his bike’s front tire. Hollis tried not to watch him, and their eyes slid to the surrounding woods. Insects were buzzing in the trees, and somewhere, Hollis knew it was raining. They were the last members of the stunt club still out on the trails: holding bags of trash, staring at each other under the rising moon, their bikes parked side by side somewhere off the trail.

At last, Jake tilted his head and opened his mouth; the depths of his eyes gleamed coppery orange, like a penny in the sun, and for a briefly startling moment of pure clarity, Hollis forgot how to breathe. “Can I come?”

“Huh?”

“Out there, with you?”

What else could Hollis say, but “yes?”

Jake didn’t stay the whole night, at first. Sometimes he’d just wander over there after practice, or just when Hollis was curling up to sleep, and they’d chat a bit before he went back to the Lodge. As the weather got warmer, Jake stayed out for longer, leaning against the tree and chatting with Hollis long into the night, about everything and anything at all.

Soon he started bringing his own blankets and bedrolls.They tried cramming an air mattress into the gap between the roots, but it wouldn’t fit, so they just had to rough it on the dirt. Jake mentioned bringing a tent, but the mere thought of it made Hollis’s skin crawl, as if they were suffocating. They preferred the air, the rain, the moonlight on their skin, and the idea of any layers between them and the world made them physically recoil.

So the two of them just… lay there, in the dirt. As one does. And there was no point where Jake seemed to truly mind.

“You ever think,” Jake said to the stars one night in August, “about going home?”

Hollis turned to look at him, leaves rustling in their hair. “Does it look like I do?” they said, voice light and teasing.

But Jake didn’t seem to hear the joke - or even notice that Hollis had spoken at all. His eyes were fixed on the patches of night sky visible through the leaves. Hollis swallowed and shifted again, following his gaze. They almost thought they saw a shooting star.

“I think about it a lot,” Jake said.

“Isn’t the Lodge your home?”

Jake shook his head slowly. “Kind of,” he said softly. “It’s - it’s complicated.”

His voice was choked in a way that made Hollis’s chest ache, as if something was grating on the inside of their ribs. “You wanna… talk about it?”

Jake rolled over, looking at them with his own blankets pulled up to his chin. “Nah,” he said quietly. “It’s - it’s fine. It is what it is, huh.”

“Yeah.” Hollis thought of stark yellow lights in the Cryptonomica parking lot, of empty garden plots and too-silent trees. “It is what it is.”

The two of them fell asleep in that small hollow, between the roots of the largest sugar maple in the forest. Hollis woke to find that in the night, they’d rolled a bit closer together - close enough that Jake’s forehead was leaning against theirs, and they could feel Jake’s breath, featherlike, on their cheek. As they lay next to him in the dirt, with the sunlight filtering down, it was as if their tree’s roots had grown around their heart and squeezed, hard.

Birds sang. In the distance, the forest let out a great, contented sigh, as wind rushed through the leaves. Dust skittered across the ground; Jake shifted slightly away from them, his eyes still closed, and took a deep, sleepy breath. Hollis swallowed and sat up. They must have slept funny or something; there was an ache in their sternum they needed to stretch out.

“G‘morning,” Jake whispered.

“Hey. Sleep well?”

Jake squeezed his eyes even further shut, and his face scrunched up. He was silent. At last, he winced, rolled his head to one side, and said, “Shit.”

Hollis's eyes flew up. “Whoa, language,” they said, nudging his foot with their own. Jake muttered something flustered and inaudible, covering his face. “What's got you in a tizzy, man?”

“My neck hurts.”

Despite themselves, Hollis laughed.

* * *

Times changed; Aunt Vicky didn’t.

When they were 18 years old, Ned Chicane just physically manifested in the Cryptonomica, as if he was one of the exhibits all along, come to sudden and intrusive life. A year after that, their aunt died, and suddenly that was just… it. Pigeon had talked to him a fair few times, and apparently he wasn’t half bad - but Hollis had never met him. Going to the Cryptonomica, after living more outside it than in it, set their teeth on edge.

Victoria hadn’t left the Cryptonomica to them. And that stung a bit, no matter how Hollis looked at it. Sure, they were 19 and Pigeon was 21, and they’d both been out of the Cryptonomica for years. It wasn’t like they’d keep the spirit of things alive there; believing in monsters and all wasn’t their thing. It was just one of those things, like it or not, that she did. Like the way she didn’t want either of them going near Amnesty Lodge, for whatever reason, and how she looked at all the residents - even Jake - with mistrust.

Hollis hated not knowing the whole story. Pigeon was just as in the dark as they were. Aunt Vicky had never shared everything about her past, and sometimes Hollis wondered how much knowledge had died with her.

Jake and the rest of the Kepler Stunt Club had more than welcomed Hollis into their ranks, since that night they’d been caught using their ramps; after the funeral, they were the first ones that Hollis ran to. Not to Pigeon. No, that was just logistics, Hollis told themselves - Leo’s store, where the stunt club went to buy snacks after meetups, was closest to the graveyard, and the trailer that Pigeon had bought that year was on the far outskirts of town. Just logistics.

Pigeon was second, though. They couldn’t leave their sister alone for long.

Things were kind of wack, now that their aunt had died. Now that Ned Chicane owned the place, Hollis was staying with Pigeon in her trailer. She’d bought it secondhand out of Whistle’s junkyard and had spent ages fixing it up, making it liveable: scrubbing down the walls, vacuuming the carpet within an inch of its life.  All Hollis could do was crash on her couch until they figured something out - and it wasn’t like they were short on options.

Keith and Jake had been first to volunteer. “We have a spare bed,” Keith said. “I mean - I dunno, if you don’t want to hang around in a house with Dad, I get that -”

“Yeah, that’s not something I want to… deal with,” Hollis said. “Your dad’s nice, but… not really a fan of cops.” That was nothing against Keith. They were getting closer with the guy, and he really did seem cool: a bit anxious at times, very loyal, eager to please, sometimes toeing the line and letting the tide of peer pressure carry him down bad roads. But he had a good heart. Hollis was glad they were getting to know him. Keith more than understood when Hollis turned him down.

Later, they and Jake were alone; the two of them sat on the porch railing of Leo’s store, staring into the street, unseeing. Hollis nursed a Wild Cherry Capri Sun; Jake had a strawberry kiwi one, and was anxiously folding the straw wrapper into a tiny square. “You can always come stay at the Lodge,” he said, almost nervously. “If you - like, unless you’ve got something else lined up -”

Hollis just patted him on the shoulder. “It’s okay, Jake,” they said, squeezing. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be around.”

* * *

“Hey, sprout - you ever think about our garden?”

Hollis looked at their sister, blinking. It was two weeks after their aunt had died. The two of them sat in Pigeon’s trailer, which was close enough to Mount Kepler that Hollis could just stroll over after a day of snowboarding. They had an ice pack on their elbow. Tim, one of the new kids, had crashed right into them coming down the green slope on Mount Kepler. They’d told him off, immediately felt bad for it, and sent him up for another run so he’d be able to do it right.

Pigeon was stretched out on the sofa in her trailer, one foot hiked up on the back and the other propped on the arm. She was physically incapable of sitting in anything properly. “The one we had out back of the Cryptonomica, when we were little,” she said softly. “We grew all sorts of shit back there.”

“Yeah, we sure did,” Hollis said. They remembered a lush tangle of pumpkin vines, the nodding heads of towering sunflowers. A lump swelled in their throat, and they looked down at the faded carpet. “Shit was wack, then, huh.”

“Mmhmm.” Pigeon shifted a bit on the couch; the springs creaked. “You ever think of growing stuff again?”

“All the time.”

“Stuff that’s not weed?”

“That’s not my gig, Pigeon,” Hollis said, “come on, I -”

“Just teasin’, sorry.” Hollis plucked a ball of lint off the sofa arm and tossed it at Pigeon; she swatted it away, laughing. “I just - it’s… different in the woods.” She picked sheepishly at the hem of her flannel, and something about her face made Hollis uneasy. Guilty, almost. “The park rangers don’t like folks growin’ crops in the woods - messes with the soil, or somethin’, and I trust that they know their shit, but I… miss it, that’s all. Ripe fruit and all that. Cantaloupes.”

Hollis nodded thoughtfully. “Tomatoes.”

“Cucumbers.”

“Cabbages.”

“Apples.”

“We didn’t grow apples.”

“Yeah, but you kept bringin’ em home,” Pigeon said, grinning at them, and Hollis flushed, remembering how they’d stolen them by the backpack from those trees near Amnesty Lodge. They grew close to the hot springs, and always had crisply sweet fruit. “Hey, I’m not complainin’. But you were the one with the green thumb, sprout - ain’t you ever thought of going back to that?”

And truth be told, they had. There wasn’t always time, though; not enough hours in the day, between stunting and grabbing lunch and going off to competitions, between climbing the trees and lying in wait for the cops to pass by and egg their cars - not enough time to sink their hands into the dirt and pull out life. That didn’t mean they didn’t miss it, though. These days, there was some kind of manic energy throbbing in Hollis’s bones that they hadn’t felt before - something that needed to go some _where._

They hadn’t planted seeds in nearly six years. Holy fucking hell.

“You know. There’s a greenhouse out in the woods.”

Hollis blinked at their sister. “What?”

“An old one, across the road from the, uh… the Little Dipper,” she said. “That’s what that place is called? Right - yeah, that ol’ place is run down, out-of-the-way - hell, it’s close enough to y’all’s ramps and stunt shit that it wouldn’t be too hard to grow something out there. I’d say growin’ something near the old bar could work, but it’s mostly asphalt. Plus,” she added, “it’s winter. It’s fuckin’ snowing, Hollis, you won’t be able to grow anything out there right now. Right?”

There was a teasing edge to her voice. Hollis grumbled, “Yeah,” and hunched down on their half of the sofa. They knew that too well. They’d tried their damndest to make bean sprouts grow in winter, once, when they were - fuck, they had to be just six or seven years old. They and their classmates had been growing beans, on damp paper towels in plastic bags, at Kepler Elementary. Just to see how root systems formed - how life sprang from the most unlikely places.

They tried to repeat the experiment in the dirt outside the Cryptonomica, jamming beans into the soil as if they could will life into the plants just by thinking about it. Nothing grew that winter. But there were little bean sprouts poking through the dirt in spring. Pigeon started calling them “sprout” after that.

“What d’you think, Hollis?”

They were 19. Pigeon was 21. There was an old greenhouse a short hike from the Little Dipper, just waiting to be reborn.

And Hollis said, “Yeah. Fuck it. I’ll grow you some cantaloupes, someday.”

* * *

If only they knew how far off someday would be.

If only they knew how much they would lose, on the way there.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "Like Real People Do," by Hozier:  
> “Why were you digging? / What did you bury / Before those hands pulled me / **From the earth**?”
> 
> Hope you liked this brief, brief introduction into the life of Hollis Wilson, stuntbiker extraordinaire! Keen-eyed readers of TMWCIFTC will notice that the opening scene is the Krampus Incident of '95, aka the incident that took Leo's arm and caused him to retire. We also get to see Indrid in action as Mission Control, aka hanging back at the Lodge to pass down instructions based on visions while the others put boots on the ground. This story **will be (mostly) TMWCIFTC and TCOS compliant.** The ending of this will be super different than TCOS, but the lore for Hollis, Mama, Victoria, and Pigeon will all be the same.
> 
> Questions, comments, concerns? Hit me up in the comments! Or hit me up with an ask at [my tumblr](https://taako-waititi.tumblr.com) if that's your jam. Have a great day, y'all! Chapter 2 is on its way soon. Thanks for reading!!


	2. It Wasn't For Us

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by the songs "Renegade" by Styx and "Big Yellow Taxi" by Jodi Mitchell. Find these songs and others here, [on the official TSG playlist.](https://open.spotify.com/user/dtw172966pmcf2qabxramdtpr/playlist/7GMWUC2qzG5W9ocl1StUYi?si=_FxfRA-mSE2MeT1nWu5gEQ)

Hollis sometimes found it hard to live in Kepler.

At times they felt like they were just a tree growing over a massive boulder in the ground, their roots diving down and around to get to the water beneath. They moved around the world, and not the other way around. Even on their best of days, the world felt shifted slightly to the left, as if they were blundering through an elaborate stage. Something seethed under Kepler that made them uneasy. They didn’t know how to control that unease, sometimes.

It was a disaster, a catastrophe of all the worst and best kinds, that changed this. Their roots became strong enough to take the boulder and crush it to dust. As captain of the Kepler Stunt Club, it felt like the world was theirs.

It really fucking sucked that Fred had to take that fall, though, for them to get it. God. Hollis wouldn’t wish that injury on any friend of theirs. Maybe a worst enemy, sure, but not a friend. 

It was late in the summer of 2014, and the Kepler Stunt Club was really getting off the ground. They’d qualified for competition after competition across the county, and taken home a hell of a lot of prize money and local sponsorships. Tim had hit a growth spurt, and he was able to afford a new pair of ski boots with the club money. And Fred… Fred was so fucking proud of them all.

Reginald Frederick Owens was the middle child of the Owens family, between his younger brother Calvin and his older brother Keith. If you ever mentioned the way their initials lined up, Keith would kick you in the shins. Fred went by his middle name on purpose for that exact reason. He had all their trophies lined up in a neat row on one of his bedroom shelves, and for a while his dad would let the Stunt Club come by to look at them. He was super proud of everyone's accomplishments. 

When it came time for the Pocahontas County cross-country regionals, though, it was time to pay that pride forward again. If  they made it to finals here, they’d qualify for eastern regionals, and then for state. There was so much riding on this - it’d be the key to success, it’d be the ticket out of town, it’d be something and everything and  _ anything.  _ They all wanted this. Fred, though, was the one who had to carry them there. 

As luck would have it, Fred was the best biker on their team: best control on and off the trail, great speed, kept taking first or second when they raced against themselves or other stunt teams. Hollis and Jake were up there, too, but it wasn’t really their thing. Hollis had been eyeing BMX lately, but the stunt club didn’t have the money - or parent approval, frankly - to get dirtbikes. Only the older kids with jobs had been able to scrape together enough to go there. And Jake was best at snowboarding. That was the structure of the stunt club; everyone was good, sure, but in competitions everyone had their special event.

It was like the Olympics, kind of. Everyone on the same team, but getting trophies in different shit. God knows Fred ran it like an Olympic team, too. Sometimes it felt like a tight ship, but it got results, and Hollis didn’t mind it too much. They were their family, and Fred was like a brother or a cool cousin to them. What else could they do but go along for the ride? 

The rest of the Kepler Stunt Club was crammed near the finish line, elbow to elbow in the summer sun, waiting for the racers to come charging around the corner. Hollis was standing somewhere near the back of the pack, sipping from a Gatorade, the forest to their back. The finish line of the bike race was at the base of a craggy slope: a sharp right turn, a breakneck fall to the bottom, dodging boulders and trees, before skidding to a halt in an open field near a stand of poplars. The field was a small thing on the side of the mountain, and below it, the mountain kept going, pitching down at a steep angle into the pines.

Jake hadn’t been able to make it. There’d been some trouble at Amnesty Lodge, apparently - something having to do with an unwelcome tenant, or some kind of disturbance, or whatever the fuck, and he had to stay back and help. Hollis missed him already. There were days every other month where Jake retreated to the Lodge - when he didn’t come to meets or competitions, where he didn’t join them under the stars by the Little Dipper - those days were hard. Everyone felt it, but especially Hollis.

Having Jake with them seemed to put a damper on their senses, sometimes, as if his presence was a pair of headphones clapped over their ears at a fireworks show. Comforting; soothing. Something within them felt at peace when they were with Jake - a peace like, though not quite the same as, the one they felt while lying under the trees after practice.

Lost in thought, they didn’t notice that the racers were heading down the path and had turned the corner, before riding down to the bottom.

Now, it was no secret that Fred was the son of Kepler’s police chief, Zeke Owens. Fred was a stickler for rules and knew Kepler’s laws front to back, just from osmosis. A cop’s boy through and through. That might have been why Fred ran such a tight ship - and like too-tight socks in boots, that tended to chafe a bit on the other members of the club. Hollis knew Fred was a bit of a stickler, sure, but he wasn’t a  _ bad  _ kid.

He didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve any of this.

The gunshots were distant, sure: two percussive cracks, most likely a shotgun, echoing from a couple of miles away. But Fred, the son of a cop, honed in on them; if he knew where they came from, their location could be reported. As he blasted through the finish line - in first place,  _ first place,  _ and God, the other stunt club members were already celebrating - Hollis saw his head jerk towards the distant gunshots.

Fred was distracted. The terrain was rough. The other bikers were pressing close behind. His tires caught on a rock and his bike pitched, and Fred  _ flew.  _ Hollis and the others watched in stunned, silent horror as Fred flew twenty feet off the cliff, into a tree, and kept  _ falling - _

“Fred, no!” Bevin screamed, and charged across the race track. The others tried to jerk him out of the way - there were still racers plowing down the side of the mountain - but he kept going like a charging bull, dodging tires and angry riders. One person tried to dodge, cursing, and fell. Hollis leapt over their spinning tires and kept running.

Fred’s bike had landed in some bushes near the top of the cliff; Fred himself had not. Hollis froze at the top of the cliff and looked down. The rest of the stunt club surged past them, but they couldn't bring themselves to move - Fred was lying there on the rocks, about thirty feet down, trying to sit up. One leg was at a weird angle. The medical team was running down to get him, someone was calling an ambulance, Tim - hell, Tim was almost  _ crying _ -

There was another gunshot. Distant, echoing, hollow. Hollis's eyes slowly lifted. From here, they could look out over the forest. In the distant sunlight, the dome that made up the roof of Amnesty Lodge gleamed.

They were so distracted by the way light glanced off the glass that they didn’t hear the footsteps behind them. Someone grabbed their shoulder and jerked them around. “Hey, what the fuck?” Hollis spat, tugging their arm away.

Some guy was standing in front of them, his racing uniform torn and smudged with dirt. “Fuck you,” he spat. Oh, great. It was Seth, captain of the Durbin Daredevils. Christ on a fucking cracker. “You knocked me off my bike! I saw you jump over me, you fucking punk!”

Okay. Seth hadn’t been knocked over at all; he’d just swerved to dodge Bevin, that was all. But they weren’t about to put Bevin on the spot for that right now; not when Fred was being gingerly strapped to a stretcher down the slope, not when they could hear sirens in the distance, not when the rest of the Kepler Stunt Club was ashen-faced and silent and Jordan had finally given in and started crying, and -

Their ears were still pricked for gunshots. Their friends were panicking. The forest was dangerous. “Not now, buddy,” Hollis said. 

They tried to turn away, but Seth grabbed their shoulder and jerked them around. “Don’t ‘buddy’ me,” he snarled. “We fuckin’ took last goddamn place because of you and your - your dumbfucks down there -”

His hand was like a manacle on Hollis’s shoulder. Their eyes slid to a nearby race staff member, who was watching the efforts to drag Fred up the cliff with squeamish concern. “Man, don’t touch me,” they snapped. Out of the corner of their eye, they saw the staff member glance over. “My captain just beefed it off the cliff, okay, I gotta - I have to go help -”

“Fuck your captain,” Seth spat. “Fuck you, your team, your mom, everyone - you made us lose!”

Hollis rolled their eyes. “Jeez, what a fuckin’ tragedy -”

The next thing they knew, they were lying in the dirt, their jaw on fire and Seth shaking out his hand, cursing. The staff members immediately swarmed him. “Asshole!” the guy said. Hollis wearily flipped him off, not caring who was watching, and pushed themselves up. 

As they sat up, they felt something under their fingertips: a faint vibration, deep in the earth, that may have been the approach of the ambulance up the hill. Leaves rustled overhead. Seth suddenly tripped over a root in the otherwise featureless dirt and fell flat on his face.

* * *

_ (“Broad daylight?  _ Broad daylight,  _ Barclay? What the hell were you thinking?” _

_ “It traveled in shadows, for fuck’s sake! We had to drive it out into the sunlight to trap and kill it, there was no other way -” _

_ “It was broad. Daylight. Barclay.” _

_ “We killed it, though!” _

_ “You could have -” _

_ “I got torn up by it a bit, Jake took a hard fall, Mama - we had to end it as soon as we could!” _

_ “There was a fucking mountain bike competition less than a mile away from where y’all were shooting! You could’ve been seen, and you sure as hell were heard, but -  _

_ “Everyone was - Jake?” _

_ “Barclay, those kids could have -” _

_ “Jake, where are you going?” _

_ “Hey, we’re not done with the meeting, Jake, come back -”) _

* * *

Jake met them at their tree that night. Hollis could hear him sprinting through the trees from yards away, twigs breaking and branches crashing as if he was a bear careening through the brush. They sighed, long and loud, and stood up from the hollow.

Jake burst from the trees in a neon blur. “Are you okay?” he blurted out, before Hollis could even say anything. “What - was the race -”

“I’m fine,” Hollis said, bemused. “I - Jake, I didn’t get hurt, it was Fred, I -”

They weren’t able to finish their sentence before Jake crashed into them, arms locked around their body like a vise. He knocked the wind out of them. Hollis froze, one hand hovering above Jake’s back, before slowly lowering it to his shoulder blades. “You’re okay,” Jake whispered. “You’re okay.”

And there was a cold, shaking desperation in his voice that made Hollis’s spine tingle, like Novocain had been shot straight into their soul. They took a deep breath and pressed their face into Jake’s shoulder. The last time they’d heard concern like this - concern shot through with fear, that made them feel as if the person would hold their soul in their hands and protect it with their lives - it had been from their aunt. That night, when they were fifteen, coming back from the dark woods with their bike.

But this wasn’t their aunt. It wasn’t a panicked stranglehold of secrecy, this thing with Jake - and they didn’t know what made it so different.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” they said softly. “Jake, what’s - what happened?”

Jake didn’t say anything for a long time. “Just some issues at the Lodge,” he said tensely. “I - a guest had a rabid dog, it was rough.”

“Oh,” Hollis said. Jake was probably lying; they’d known each other for a few years, now, and Hollis knew all of Jake’s tells. But it was hard to focus on those tells when Jake was clutching them so close, like he’d just seen them rise from the dead. “Seriously,” they said, swallowing past a lump in their throat. “Are you okay?”

“I’m good,” Jake said softly. “But - hang on, Hollis -”

He let go of them and looked at their face, frowning. “Fred,” he said slowly, as if just realizing something. “You said - Fred, what happened?”

Hollis sighed; the confusion in Jake’s eyes turned slowly to fear. “Fred ate shit off the cliff at the end of the race,” they said softly. “Hit almost every tree in Kepler on the way down. He tore his ACL and his Achilles tendon, he’s -”

“Oh,  _ no,” _ Jake breathed.

“Yeah, he’s not gonna be able to race,” Hollis said. They didn’t say it, but there had been rumors floating around - no less than four hours after the accident, where Sheriff Owens had screeched up to the ER entrance in his fucking  _ squad car  _ \- that Fred was going to have to quit the stunt club entirely. If the way their little brother Calvin was growing up was any indication, the sheriff hated how Keith and Fred were still in the stunt club. This would just be the last straw.

Besides. A torn ACL would take six to nine months to recover; a ruptured Achilles tendon would take almost a year. And even after that, his legs would never be the same. Hollis felt like they were standing on the sand in the top half of an hourglass. Swirling down, down. This was the end of something - they could feel it, but God, they didn’t know what -

“Wait, but - who the fuck is gonna go?”

“I don’t know,” Hollis said. “He got first, so we’re still qualified to go to finals, but someone else is going to have to step in to race.”

“You’ve got my vote.”

Hollis froze.

Jake was looking at them dead in the eye, still smiling. He nudged them in the shoulder. “C’mon, you’re good,” he said. “I caught you using the stunt club ramps - what, six, seven years ago? You did a backflip off the ramp in the middle of a dark forest. I thought you were gonna die, but you stuck the landing and everything on your second try. I  _ never  _ could have done that on a bike. You’re really good, Holls - you could do it!”

Years. It was years. Hollis sank down into the hollow beneath their tree, staring at the woods around them. Jake hesitantly joined them on the ground, shuffling back until his back was pressed against the bark. Had it really been that long ago, since they’d been using the ramps? Had Jake really been in their life since then?

“You can race in finals,” Jake said. He patted Hollis’s knee. Warmth seared through their jeans. It was as if the whole forest had stood still. “You can do it. C’mon, Holls.”

“No,” they choked out. “I don’t - there’s probably someone better than me, Keith’s gettin’ good -”

“He’s good, yeah, but you know how he gets under pressure,” Jake said. Hollis grimaced and looked at the ground. That was true; Keith had a lot of bluster and big talk, but sometimes when it came down to the wire he folded like a house of cards. “People look up to you, man, you’ve got it all in the bag. Tim follows you around like a puppy, the younger kids are always out there tryin’ to do what you’re doing. You’re like -” 

His voice faltered. “You matter a lot to the stunt club, Holls,” Jake said at last. His voice was oddly serious, and it made something in Hollis’s chest settle, like an uneven flagstone nudged into place. “Nobody’s gonna be pissed off if you go in Fred’s place. Definitely not me.”

“What if - what about you, what if you raced?”

“I’m out of practice, I’ve been… uh.” Jake swallowed. “I’ve been a bit busy lately, if I was to race against the fucking Daredevils, I’d be toast -”

“Funny story,” Hollis said slowly, “their team captain actually got last place.”  _ And punched me in the jaw, _ they didn’t say. “They’re not goin’ to finals, at all.”

Jake was silent for a bit. “Oh,” he said faintly. “That... blows.”

“For them.”

“For them, yeah.”

Hollis nudged him in the ribs, and the two of them snickered. Jake sighed and leaned his head against the bark of Hollis’s tree. “So… you’re gonna race finals, right?”

“No.”

“Seriously?”

_ “No.” _

* * *

“I’m racing in finals,” Hollis muttered to themselves at the starting line, two weeks later. “I’m racing in finals. Oh, God, oh fuck -” The racer next to them gave them a weird look; they glared right back. When their neighbor sheepishly looked away, they took a deep, shaky breath that made their ribs hurt. “Fuck. Shit.  _ Fuck.” _

“You got this, Hollis!” Tim yelled from the sidelines. Hollis exhaled sharply, blowing their hair out of their face, and glanced over. The rest of the Kepler Stunt Club stood on the sidelines, their arms hanging over the sawhorse barricades, sharing cold sports drinks and waiting for the starting signal to go off. It was two in the afternoon. Hollis adjusted their grip on the handlebars and smiled back, feeling as if they were sitting in a cannon, about to be launched into the sky.

Jake was sitting on one of the barricades, legs swinging free and his toes dragging through the dirt. He grinned, teeth flashing in the sun, and gave them a cheerful thumbs up. Hollis waggled their fingers at him. 

“Ten!” shouted the race organizer. The big LCD clock by the starting line flashed bright red, then displayed the numbers again. “Nine! Eight!”

Jake sat up a bit straighter, glanced sidelong at the rest of the stunt club, and looked back at Hollis. They watched as Jake carefully lifted both his hands from the sawhorse and held them up to his chest, fingers twisted in the shape of -

“Seven! Six!”

A heart. Hollis almost fell off their bike.

“You got this!” Jake yelled. He teetered back and forth on the sawhorse, without his hands to stabilize him. Cam grabbed him by the shoulder just as he started to fall backwards. Hollis wanted to laugh, but somehow the noise got stuck between their lungs and their throat. They saw Keith staring at Jake, realization dawning on his face -

“Five! Four! Three!”

Wind whipped the trees into a frenzy; the leaves of late summer fell to the ground and skittered across the path. Hollis adjusted their grip on the handlebars and looked straight ahead, grinning at the open trail before them. Something thrummed in their chest, in their brain, in their hands, crackling in their knuckles and zipping down their spine like thrills of static electricity.

“Two!”

There was a deep percussive creak in the trees flanking the starting line. Hollis saw the riders next to them flinch, look at the trees in alarm - since Fred’s accident, everyone had been leery of random noises in the woods. But the noise the trees made was as if they were caught in a swirling hurricane, as if the trees were shouting their names into the wind. It was not random, to Hollis: it was a pattern, it was a language, it was a battle cry, it had purpose - even if they didn’t know what it was. 

There was resonance, deep in their bones - and they smiled.

“One!”

The starting alarm sounded. Hollis slammed their foot down on their mountain bike’s pedals and took off, leaving their distracted opponents in the dust. In the distance, they heard Jake screaming their name.

* * *

Needless to say, they won.

God, they  _ won -  _ Hollis nearly wiped out twice, and they had to swerve out of the way when two folks got their wheels tangled in front of them. But they held their ground, stayed on the bike all the way down the mountain and blasted through the finish line. The rest of the club had - for once - waited for the other riders to pass Hollis before running out on the track to swarm them. If Hollis hadn’t gotten off their bike at the finish line, they would have lifted them - bike and all - into the air. As it was, Bevin and Jordan grabbed them and put them on their shoulders, and refused to put them down. 

They took Kepler by storm. Alice and Jordan hit Leo’s store to pick up celebration food and drinks; while they were gone, the others wheeled Hollis’s mountain bike to the riverside, singing “We Are The Champions” at the top of their lungs like a bunch of drunken pirates. Seized by a burst of inspiration, Cam raced home, ignoring his friends yelling at him to come back. 

Jake had part of the finish line ribbon tied around his head like a bandana, and one arm slung around Hollis’s shoulders. They threw an arm around Jake’s waist and lifted the trophy in the air, grinning at the folks on the porch of the Kepler Coffee Company, the bookstore-coffeehouse combo on riverside. The evening summer air was like silk on the back of their neck. 

The picnic area was on a small, skinny, tree-covered island, near where the Greenbrier River widened and hooked southwest. A wooden footbridge connected the island and the sandy shore. Hollis carefully put their first-place trophy - topped with a golden mountain biker pointed downhill on an invisible slope - on one of the picnic tables. God, that trophy looked so good. Jake tugged off the finish line headband and draped it over the biker’s head. His arm was still around Hollis’s shoulders. Everyone kept singing, out of tune as a sick accordion, their words nearly drowned by the rushing river.

Then Cam came sprinting down to the picnic area, thumping across the bridge. He was holding a boombox on his shoulder - something the size of a small child, straight out of the nineties, for sure - and a plastic bag full of 8 tracks and CDs. “I got it!” he panted, skidding to a halt and slamming the massive boombox on the table. “Found it in my attic -”

“Dude, what the fuck -”

“Shh!” He rifled through the bag. “Anybody have music requests?,” he shouted. The stunt club guys down in the river stopped slinging water at each other and looked over, puzzled. “Keep it between the 70s and 90s, I dunno what else I’ve got in here -”

“You got ‘All Star’?” Jordan said, hopping off their perch on the back of a park bench. The out-of-tune strains of “We Are The Champions” finally faded, and the stunt club shuffled close to the boombox.

“Fuck yeah, I got ‘All Star’,” Cam said, nodding seriously. “Here, someone - anyone got paper?” Jordan tore the cardboard twelve-pack of Mountain Dew in half, sending cans rattling across the picnic area, and pulled a pen out of their pocket. People started scribbling down song requests on it.

“Keith, you’re so fuckin’ old,” Alice said.

Keith scowled at her, jamming a CD into the boombox. Cam made a vague noise of protest. “I have taste, shut up,” he muttered, pressing the play button. 

_ “Queen?” _

“Yeah, taste!”

A ladder of piano notes trickled out of the speakers, Freddie Mercury’s voice floating over the top, and Hollis felt one corner of their mouth lift in a smile. The wind kicked up and almost blew the list of song requests off the table; they slammed a can of Dew on it and turned up the volume.  _ “Tonight,”  _ Freddie crooned.  _ “I’m gonna have myself a real good time -” _

A chorus of voices rose up - “I feel ali-i-i-ive!” 

Hollis shimmied their shoulders to the words and glanced over at Jake, grinning. Jake’s arm finally slid off their shoulder - and then they realized that his arm had been there the whole time, and it was as if someone had shoved them hard in the chest. They stared at him, the rush of the river behind them roaring in their ears. 

_ “And the world, I’ll turn it inside out -” _

Jake swayed back and forth a little, to the words, _“Floatin’ around in ecstasy,”_ and Hollis laughed. They laughed even more when Jake flashed them a grin and started to moonwalk. “What,” Jake snickered. “You think I can’t dance?”

“No, you can’t.”

“I can still dance better than you.”

“At least I know how to fuckin’ moonwalk, here -” Hollis grabbed Jake’s elbow and dragged him to an emptier part of the picnic area, on some grass near the far side of the island. The echoes of the song followed them both; it kicked up to a higher tempo, and the others started singing along. Having a backing track to match their pitch to sure didn’t help them sound any better, but hey - they were having fun. If anyone else in town said something or complained, Hollis would give them hell.

They put their Mountain Dew can on a fencepost and faced Jake, cracking their knuckles. “Okay, c’mere,” they said. “We’re going to do this the right way.”

“I already know how!” Jake said indignantly. 

His face was twitching as he tried to stifle a grin, and he bit down hard on his lip to keep from laughing. The sight made Hollis’s chest ache, and they cleared their throat. Just heartburn, maybe. They had to quit drinking so much Mountain Dew.

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” they said. “Okay, start like this - feet flat, straight ahead - yep, you got it - then lift your right foot so you’re just on your toes, and - and - Jake.”

“Yep?”

“Stop that.”

Jake had shifted his heels together, like Dorothy clicking her heels to jet back home to Kansas. “What?” he said.

“This isn’t ballet, man, you’re about as flexible as uncooked fettuccine -”

“Watch me,” Jake said, lifting his chin defiantly. He kicked one of his legs out at an angle - surprisingly high, Hollis had to admit; maybe he was more flexible than they thought. But that had the unfortunate side effect of knocking him off-balance; his other foot skidded on the ground, and like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football, Jake slipped and fell right on his ass.

Hollis’s laughter echoed off the buildings. “Here, get up,” they wheezed, holding out a hand. It took a long, long time for Jake to collect himself enough to take it.

It took a long time for him to let go. They let him take all the time he needed. 

* * *

And they laughed, and they danced, and they ate and drank like Vikings after a battle - Jake finally figured out how to moonwalk properly, and Jordan popped in some Michael Jackson CDs so Jake could groove along to them. Tim was trying, and failing, to breakdance. People were piling empty Dew cans around the base of their first-place trophy, as if solemnly placing offerings on an altar. Keith and Cam were swapping out CDs and taking song requests; they stood there waving their hands around, holding imaginary headphones to their ears like they were DJs. They were dancing, they were breathing, they were  _ living. _

Fuck, Hollis felt like they’d finally come home. 

* * *

They were sitting on the back of a park bench, watching Jordan try to tackle Alice to keep her from Gangnam-styling to “Copacabana” by Barry Manilow, when it happened.

Wind hissed in the grass. The cans of empty Mountain Dew around the trophy scattered, clattered to the ground. Hollis stopped one with their foot, but another kept rolling towards the riverbank. “Hey, James, pick those up for me, will you?” they said. James nodded and started picking up the cans; he crushed each one in his hand and chucked it into a paper bag as he went. Hollis saw Andre drop his Capri Sun, staring open-mouthed at him. They rolled their eyes and headed down to the river to grab that last can. It was stuck between a clump of grass and a rock in the river. Hollis bent down to pick it up.

Something wet and sludgy hit them in the back of the head, and they pitched forward, almost falling into the water. Their fingertips skimmed the back of their head, and came back stained with mud. “Hey!” they barked. A few of the kids on the riverbank looked up, puzzled. The mud started oozing down the back of their neck, cold and slimy. “Who threw that?”

“Huh?”

“Someone threw mud at me, y’all, what the fuck?” Left unattended, the boombox was still playing the “Greatest Hits of the 70’s” CD. A voice was singing softly, but Hollis couldn’t make out their words over the panicked buzzing in their skull. 

Hollis heard empty cans clattering across the ground. “Hey!” Jake yelled. “Hey, what the heck, put that down -”

They turned in time to see a teenage girl clad in a red racing jacket pick up their first place trophy. Something about her jacket set off alarm bells in Hollis’s head. “Don’t touch that, please,” Jake said, lifting both hands. “Dude. Seriously -”

She turned and smashed the trophy to pieces on the edge of a metal trash can.

The  _ crack _ echoed across the water and off the buildings. Everyone went still; it was like the silence after a lightning bolt, tense and waiting for the thunder - broken only by the blaring music:

_ “Oh, Momma, I'm in fear for my life from the long arm of the law _

_ Lawman has put an end to my runnin', and I'm so far from my home…” _

Static crackled. The mournful song sent a nauseous shiver down Hollis’s spine; all they could see was the light playing on the trophy’s shattered edges, like fire on broken teeth. “What the fuck?” they said loudly.

“That was… really not tubular,” Jake said faintly. Behind him, Alice pulled out a Swiss army knife; the kid in the red jacket gnashed her teeth. “Hey, no!” Jake said, whipping around. “Put that away, guys, seriously, it’s - this isn’t cool, but we don’t have to fight over it -”

“Y’all sure about that?”

Something large splashed to their right. Hollis looked up and saw their mountain bike upside down in the water, its wheels spinning feebly. And up on the riverbank was a stranger in a red leather coat like the girl’s, covered in patches and pins, their dyed-red hair spiked up into a ratty mohawk.

Well, not a complete stranger. Hollis knew that hair, and that coat, and the insignia on his shoulder, and that fucking self-satisfied grin. 

Seth. Captain of the Daredevils. And if the footsteps behind him was any indication, he’d brought his fucking crew with him from Durbin, all sixteen miles down by way of Back Mountain Road. That was at least an hour’s travel, by bike. They must have been planning this, they must have been  _ waiting - _

They felt the bruise on their chin throb, as if it had been set on fire with a poker. 

“Dude, what the fuck?” Bevin said, his deep voice high with panic. 

“Watch the potty mouth, kiddo,” Seth drawled, jamming his hands into his pockets. Hollis glanced at Bevin, and he stared back with terror in his eyes. He was probably blaming himself for the Daredevils being here; Hollis knew how blame worked, they knew how the cycle was probably going in his head. If he hadn’t run out, then Seth wouldn’t have crashed; if Seth hadn’t crashed, then the Daredevils wouldn’t have wanted revenge and showed up to crash the party.

They shook their head.  _ It’s alright,  _ they thought, hoping Bevin got the message. The other boy swallowed and looked away. Hollis said, “Seth.”

“Hollis.” Seth spat in the river, on Hollis’s mountain bike. “Havin’ a little victory party down here, eh? Buzzin’ around, like a little nest of hornets?” Hollis heard someone crack their knuckles, and gritted their teeth. “Hate to spray a can of Raid on your victory parade, but… y’know.” He spread his hands, taking in the scene. “It ain’t something you’ve earned.”

Hollis noticed belatedly that their tires had been slashed, and fresh rage rose in their throat like bile. “Say that again,” they said softly.

Seth leered at them. “It ain’t,” he said loudly, each word slow like he was speaking to a baby, “something you’ve -”

Hollis tackled him into the Greenbrier before he could finish. A knife fell out of his hand; they could see the streetlights gleaming on it as it sank to the bottom. Seth came up choking on river water.

There were shouts, shattering glass; Tim screamed something about a rock, and there was a loud splash to their left. Jake screamed something Hollis couldn’t quite make out. Cold water trickled down their arms and neck. Seth tried to stand up, but Hollis put their knee on his back and pushed him down into the river. He made a horrid gurgling sound and flailed around a bit in the water, but Hollis had stood up and was wading, full speed, towards their bike.

By now, it had fallen into the river; just one pedal stuck out of the water, spinning feebly in the river’s current. Hollis grabbed the handlebars and hauled it out of the river; its wheels whirled briefly, sending a spray of droplets into their face. They stomped up the riverbank to the picnic tables, leaning their bike against a tree.

A Daredevil’s fist soared towards their face. They ducked, tried to grab it but missed. The Daredevil - a lanky kid with torn black jeans and three studs in his left ear - stumbled forward and kicked them in the shin. It exploded with pain, and Hollis screamed; their leg buckled underneath them. Son of a fuck, that  _ hurt.  _

They gritted their teeth and glared up at the kid, who was now staring at them, terrified; it was like he didn’t expect his kick to do any damage. Well. Shit. Hollis had reservations about beating shit out of someone who didn’t actually want to hurt them, but there had to be an exception -

The kid skittered back. In his place, someone’s foot rocketed towards their face. Hollis just barely turned in time, and their boot clipped their cheek. They looked up and saw a water-logged Seth; the man looked like a drowned rat, his scraggly mohawk plastered flat to his head, seething with rage above them. Okay. That’d do. Hollis rolled out of the way of his next kick. Their arm smacked into a fallen tree branch; they grabbed it and lurched to their feet, holding it in both hands like a club. “Wanna try that again?” they spat at Seth.

There must have been something in Hollis’s eyes that made Seth stop, midway through winding up for a punch. He swallowed and took a step back. “Yeah, that’s what I fuckin’ thought,” Hollis snarled, and swiped the branch at him. It clipped Seth in the jaw, leaving faint scratches on his pale skin.

It was chaos on this island: a slurry of music, screams, things breaking, howling wind - complete and utter anarchy. Seth still tried to throw punches; Hollis took one to the shoulder, then whipped their branch around and clocked him in the head. They wielded it like a sword, trying to drive him back, away, anywhere but  _ here.  _ This wasn’t the Daredevils’ town - they had no right to be here, no right to do  _ this  _ to them.

All they knew how to do was fight fire with fire; that was all they could do, when Seth’s team was trying to beat… something into them. Sense? Fear? Those were in short supply here as it was. Hollis’s branch whistled through the air, narrowly missing Seth’s head. He seemed to get the message that he was out of his league here, turned, and sprinted off to the other end of the island. Hollis’s eyes followed him, and their heart sank. 

Oh, Christ on a cracker, this was  _ chaos.  _ The picnic area seethed like an overturned anthill. A Daredevil kneed Keith in the back. Cam grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her into the river. Tim was hiding behind a tree, while a couple Daredevils kicked away the pieces of their broken trophy; James tried to salvage the pieces as they rocketed past him.

All the while, the boombox was still blasting that fuckforsaken song. It had picked up the pace now, the singer’s voice wailing high and mournful above the crowd - 

_ “Dear, Momma, I can hear you a cryin', _

_ So scared and all alone! _

_ Hangman is comin' down from the gallows, _

_ And I don't have very long. _

 

_ The jig is up! The news is -” _

The song suddenly and abruptly faded, as if playing from the window of a speeding car. Hollis whipped around, in time to see the boombox soar through the air like a punted football and smash through the window of Dave’s Dehumidifier Depot.

Oh,  _ fuck. _

The fight ground to a screeching halt, as the security alarms in the store blared. They could barely hear the song playing. Broken glass hung suspended from the window frame, and then fell out like loose teeth. “Shit,” a Daredevil said hoarsely. The tree branch fell out of Hollis’s hand.

Hollis looked around desperately. The Daredevils and the Stunt Club kids were backing away from each other, staring at the ruined storefront; some of them even started to sprint away, to the bikes leaning against the porch of Leo’s store. Hollis could see shocked store patrons up and down Main Street peering at the wreckage. Someone on the back porch of the Kepler Coffee Company slammed their cup down and went inside in a huff.

“He’s callin’ the cops,” Keith said faintly, at their elbow. Hollis turned; their friend’s face was ashen with panic. “Shit. Fuck, my dad’s - oh,  _ no - _ ”

“It’ll be alright,” Hollis said, grabbing his elbow. “Let’s just - let’s just go, come on -”

“But -”

“We can’t stay here, we gotta go,” Hollis snapped. They raised their voice. “Scatter! Come on, move!” Everyone started to sprint away from the picnic area - some splashed through the water separating the island from the shore, others took the bridge. Seth, a shivering, muddy mess, hauled himself across the bridge, his shoes squishing with river water. He threw Hollis a glare; Hollis flipped him off and grabbed their bike, preparing to just… hoist it on their shoulders and sprint away. The wheels were more than shot - they weren’t looking forward to having to get them replaced -

Sirens sounded in the distance. Fuck. Hollis felt eyes on them and turned. “Oh, Christ, Jake,” they sighed. “You’re okay. Come on, let’s go, we have to get out of here -”

Jake was standing feet away from them, mouth hanging open in shock. “Come on,” they said, grabbing his shoulder. Jake was still staring at them, frozen; there was a strange look in his eyes that sat wrong in Hollis’s stomach. They shook his shoulder a bit. “C’mon, Jake, we gotta go, let’s -”

The sirens drew closer. Jake said nothing, just slowly shook his head.

Something cold and stony sank into their gut. Now the look in his eyes started to register. Jake was looking at them as if he had seen a car accident, had seen a forest start to go up in flames - in cold, helpless terror.

“Jake?” they whispered.

And Jake slowly shook his head, and took a step back. Their hand slid off his shoulder, but was still outstretched; a cold breeze blew through their empty fingers. “This wasn’t it,” he said, voice choked. “It was never about this, Hollis, I -”

“Jake -”

“I can’t,” he said. His eyes were gleaming with tears. “I - I can’t do this, I’m sorry -”

“Jake, no!  _ Please - _ ”

But there was nothing they could do. They watched as Jake turned and ran down the road, away from the picnic area - towards the sirens, on the heels of the fleeing Daredevils. The red-blue strobe of the police lights on the trees flickered almost purple in their vision like a darkening bruise. 

“Hollis, come on!” Cam barked, shoving them in the shoulder. They snapped out of their trance, gritted their teeth, and grabbed their bike, sprinting off in the opposite direction from Jake. 

Their feet took them past main street - past Lake Ridge Apartments - past the outer reaches of town, the dirt road that led to the Cryptonomica parking lot, nearly to the outskirts of town. Their mountain bike rattled in their arms; it was heavy, like they were holding a corpse, and it wasn’t long before their arms started to burn. All they could think of was the look in Jake’s eyes - his fear, his horror, even his  _ disgust,  _ if they thought about it too long. It tore at them in a way they were too afraid to name.

He’d run to the cops. He’d run away from the stunt club - from  _ Hollis.  _ His voice seemed to echo in the trees, high and terrified:  _ “It was never about this -” _

They didn’t realize they’d ended up at the Park and Camp RV lot, until Pigeon’s camper loomed out of the darkness like a ship in the night. Hollis threw their bike down by the door and tugged on the door handle. It was locked - but a light flickered on inside as they pounded on the door. Pigeon shoved the door open so hard it bounced off the camper’s siding. “What the fuck - oh, shit.” Her voice dropped to a hushed whisper. “Hollis? What’s goin’ on, you okay?”

“I…” Their voice trailed off. They didn’t know what to say.

There must have been something in their face, though. Pigeon could read them like a book. Her eyes softened, and she held out her arms. Hollis fell into them, something deep in their chest threatening to collapse. Their throat closed up. “C’mon, sprout, come inside,” Pigeon said softly. “C’mere. It’s okay.”

“I fucked up,” they whispered, their voice hollow. Pigeon ran a reassuring hand over their back. “Pidge, I… I fucked up so, so bad…”

“I’m sorry,” Pigeon said, gently easing them down onto the couch. Hollis felt a weary, bone-deep ache in their chest, and clamped their arms even tighter around their sister. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“It’s not.”

“Yes, it is.”

“The cops are after us.”

“Shit, really?”

But she kept holding them. She didn’t judge, she didn’t pry, she didn’t let go. The words unspooled from Hollis like she’d grabbed hold of them and tugged: the race, the dancing, the rise and the fall; their bike’s tires spinning in the river, slashed into ribbons. Their broken trophy. Dave’s broken window. Jake’s broken stare.

“It shouldn’t have gotten so out of hand,” they said hoarsely. “It was… bad. I dunno if the cops are going to come after us, but - I just. God. We fucked up. I don’t know how we’re going to make this better, but… I just don’t know.”

Pigeon was silent for a long, long time; all they could hear was her breathing in the silence of her camper. “Hollis,” she said quietly.

“I -”

“No, lemme finish, squirt. Do y’all still have the trophy?”

Hollis paused. They weren’t… actually sure where it’d ended up. Maybe Keith had grabbed the pieces, or Cam, or maybe Celine, who knew. “I think so,” they said.

“Well.” Pigeon ran her hand over Hollis’s back. “Bring ‘em by when you get the chance, will you? I got a new tube of super glue and a hot glue gun. Might take some wrangling to get the gun going, I’ve never used it before, but hey. First time for everything, am I right?”

“You’re right,” Hollis mumbled.

“We can fix it, sprout,” Pigeon whispered. “It’s gonna be okay. Really.” 

Hollis didn’t know what to say. An image flashed through their mind, a sense: hard-packed earth, twisting roots, leaves rustling high overhead in the morning breeze, Jake’s hair tickling their face - 

They squeezed their eyes shut. They couldn’t go back. Not tonight. “Can I stay here?” they said softly.

Pigeon squeezed them tight. “Hollis,” she said. “You don’t even have to ask.”

* * *

The doorknob flew up, down. Up, down.

Hollis lay on their back, idly tossing it into the air and catching it again, just to see how it glimmered in the light. Pigeon was replacing the bathroom doorknob; her overalls had caught on it last night, a week after the riot, and she’d fallen over, ripping the doorknob out and fucking up the hinges. She’d gone down to Leo’s to get a new one this morning. Her old high school friend Pete sat on the floor next to her, helpfully passing her tools as she worked.

The radio crackled on the kitchen counter: the DJ’s soft, staticky murmur, transitioning out of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” by The Who. Hollis caught the doorknob one last time and listened close; they were still tapping their toe to the rhythm of the previous song. 

“Screwdriver,” Pigeon said, holding a hand out. Pete put her ham sandwich in her hand instead. “You fuckin’ - alright, fine.” She put the sandwich on the hinge, pretending to tighten the screw with it; Pete cackled and slumped back against the wall, covering his face.

A few cheerfully-strummed chords blasted out of the radio. Hollis flinched and gripped the doorknob hard, the screw on its back digging into their palm. The off-beat, jaunty guitar was a bit groovy, they had to admit. They tapped their toe a bit, letting the music wash over them. Hollis didn’t think they’d ever heard this before.

The singer crooned,

_ They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot, _

_ With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot - _

Pete whistled softly to the music. “Seriously, I need the screwdriver,” Pigeon said.

“Sorry.”

He rummaged in the toolbox; the clanking metal obscured the next words, and Hollis tried hard to listen - but the whole next stanza was blocked out. They bopped their head a bit, sat up and listened hard to the next stanza, because despite themselves they were kind of digging the tune.

_ They took all the trees, and put them in a tree museum _

_ And they charged all the people a dollar and a half to see 'em _

_ Don't it always seem to go _

_ That you don't know what you've got _

_ 'Till it's gone - _

Their faint smile slipped off their face. The woman kept on singing, but the words muddled together like static in their head. 

_ You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. _

Something was gone. Something had packed up and left, the moment Jake had run towards the cops last week - but they didn’t know what it was. Hollis  _ still  _ didn’t know what it was. Not until he was gone.

Something in their chest burned, hot and raw, like it was trying to burst out. Hollis slammed the doorknob on the counter and shoved open the door. Their sister called out to them, but by then they were long gone into the woods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "Jackie and Wilson" by Hozier: “Happy to lie back, watch it burn and rust/We tried to work, good God **it wasn't for us**.” 
> 
> Oh, Hollis. Oh, Jake. You poor, poor souls. 
> 
> Yeah so I got... hella impatient and wanted to publish this. I have the whole thing outlined and the vast majority of the second half of this story written, so like. Depending on how much caffeine I ingest, I might be able to get this story out and published by the last week of May??? Who knows! School's finally over for the semester, so anything goes at this point.
> 
> As always, feel free to drop me a line in the comments, or [on my tumblr](https://taako-waititi.tumblr.com/) if you so choose. See y'all on the flipside of chapter 3!


	3. The Rising

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by a whole bevy of songs:  
> "London Calling" - The Clash  
> "Killing in the Name" - Rage Against The Machine  
> "Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2" - Pink Floyd  
> "Phoenix Rising" - Calum Graham  
> "Fire" - Barns Courtney  
> "Broken Crown" - Mumford and Sons  
> "Wicked Ones" - Dorothy  
> "Opening" - Craig Armstrong  
> "Liz On Top Of The World" - Jean-Yves Thibaudet
> 
> These songs and more can be found on [the official TSG playlist.](https://open.spotify.com/user/dtw172966pmcf2qabxramdtpr/playlist/7GMWUC2qzG5W9ocl1StUYi?si=-574QPTDQaKP8bW6r2pFuQ)

It took time, but they grew.

* * *

Leo’s general store always smelled faintly of leather and old cinnamon; the dull fluorescent bulbs gleamed on neat rows of cans, boxes, freezers and refrigerators, the sparse collection of household repair items for sale. The air conditioner buzzed faintly at the back of the store, kicking up a constant cloud of dust around the frozen foods section. The low wood-paneled ceiling and close shelves were almost cozy.

Hollis liked to hang out in there, even when they didn’t have to buy anything. Leo had an inordinate amount of trust in them; Hollis suspected they could pitch a tent and start a campfire in the pasta section, and Leo would let them. The only strange thing about the store was that Leo never had olive oil in stock. But to each their own.

This store was peaceful in a way that Hollis desperately needed. They and Keith walked through its creaky doors a week and a half after the riot, shopping baskets in hand, wielding a hastily-scribbled list that the rest of them had made less than half an hour ago. Hollis immediately went for the back, giving Leo a curt nod.

The further away from the doors, the better. After the county finals riot, living in Kepler felt like holding a rubber band about to snap. Hollis kept looking over their shoulder wherever they went as if expecting Sheriff Owens to come blasting out of an alley in his squad car, handcuffs at the ready. And God, not to mention their competition schedule. They were in hell. Looking at a calendar for the rest of August gave Hollis a stress headache.

They picked up two bags of chips, glancing between them without really seeing them. “Just get both,” Keith whispered. “Andre likes Cool Ranch.” Hollis grunted and put them in the shopping basket. “You want to get some more Dew?”

“Nah, that stuff fucks with my stomach,” Hollis said softly. Something about the rush of the AC, the still hush of the store, made speaking above a whisper almost painful. As if they’d break some kind of sacred silence. The bell tinkled above the door, but they stood too far away from the entrance to see who’d come in. “You want to get some, feel free, but you’re buying.”

“Aw, come on -”

“I’m serious - you have your own money, you go get some. Go on, shoo,” Hollis said, gently shoving their friend towards the drinks aisle. Keith went with only a little complaining.

Yeah. They didn’t want to risk drinking Mountain Dew before the competition; even looking at a can these days, after the riot fiasco, made their stomach turn. They couldn’t risk having something as small as that mess this up. This was everything to Hollis - because it wasn’t like they had anything else going on in their life right now. They felt phantom roots digging into their back, a cool summer night's breeze in their hair, and closed their eyes.

They hadn't gone to sleep under their tree in a week. It tugged at them, even now, standing in the wood-paneled aisles of Leo's store - they missed it, in a yearning way that made their ribs ache. But they were almost afraid to go back there, no matter how much it hurt… because they were almost afraid of what they might find. Empty dirt, perhaps. Blank spaces. A world torn in half like a badly-ripped page from a magazine.

On the other side of the shelves, Jake said softly, “Hey.”

Their eyes flew open, and they flinched so hard that they let go of the can of cheese dip. In the gap between bags of chips, they could see a flash of neon blue, a swoop of dyed blonde hair. “What kind did Barclay need again?”

A woman’s unfamiliar voice: “Spaghetti.”

“Not fettuccine?”

“No, that’s next week’s dinner. You might have to grab some sauce, I dunno how much we’ve got left -”

“Awesome…” There was rustling, a plastic crunch, as if Jake had picked up a packet of something. “Still can’t believe he forgot to add water to the noodles…”

“Yeah, not his proudest moment,” the young woman said. “Good thing the fire extinguishers still work. While we’re here, d’you want to get some Twinkies?”

“For real?”

“Yeah - and maybe grab some popcorn while you’re at it,” she said. “Next aisle over. We’re watching _The Office,_ remember?”

“Right.”

Jake’s voice was soft, subdued. Hollis caught themselves leaning against the shelves, the chip bags crunching under their arms, as they tried to get closer to his voice. It hurt them to hear that weariness. It was all they could do to keep themselves from reaching through the shelves to put a hand on his shoulder.

“You sure you’re okay?” she said softly.

“I’m fine, Dani,” Jake said.

“You _sure?”_

“Yep, sure am. What flavor do y’all want?”

Dani sighed. “Kettle corn, if he’s got it in stock -”

Then they realized. Jake’s voice was heading to the other end of the aisle, near the front of the store. Hollis stared at the food around them; it took them too long to realize that the popcorn was in their aisle. “Shit,” they whispered, skin crawling, and lunged for the back of the store. Leo heard their approaching footsteps and looked up from the register, greying eyebrows raised.

Keith was standing there with a 12-pack of Mountain Dew cans on his hip. Hollis clipped his shoulder on the way past, and he nearly dropped it. “Dude, what the fuck -”

“Shh!” Hollis spat, and vaulted over the counter, shopping basket and all. Their stomach was lurching in a terrible, seasick way; every heartbeat felt like they’d been stabbed, right between the ribs. This was the first time they’d been this close to Jake since the riot.

“You alright?” Leo whispered.

“I’m not here,” Hollis hissed back. Leo nodded, seeming to understand in a heartbeat, and pretended to go through the cash register.

On the other side of the counter, though, Hollis heard Keith speak. “Jake.” His voice was cold, sharp, in a way that almost made Hollis want to jump over the counter again and drag him away. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“Hi, Keith,” Jake said in a small voice. Hollis squeezed their eyes shut.

There was a long, drawn-out silence. Above them, Leo sighed and jammed his hands into his pockets. “Are y’all gonna pay for that spaghetti or not?” he said flatly.

“Right, sorry,” Jake said. “S’cuse me, Keith.”

“S’cuse yourself,” Keith said in a biting voice. Hollis gritted their teeth; fuck, it was all they could do to keep themselves from standing up and giving Keith a piece of their mind. They hugged their knees and stared at the wall, listening as Leo silently rung up Jake’s items. He and Dani hastily left before Keith could say anything more.

They didn’t stand up until they heard the bell tinkle and the door slam shut. Keith was leaning on the other side, waiting for them to come back up. “The hell was that, man?” he said.

“It’s nothing,” Hollis sighed, propping their elbows on the counter. They glanced over at Leo. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” Leo said wearily. “Would you mind gettin’ on the other side of the counter, there, kid?”

“Yep.” Hollis vaulted back over the counter, nearly knocking over a display of touristy magnets. “We’re done here. Keith, you’re buying.”

“What -”

“That's your Dew.”

“And these are your chips! You have a five, fork it over -”

Hollis sighed and dug in their pocket for their wallet. Keith added a ten to their five and tapped them idly on the counter, as Leo rung up their items. “These yours, too?” the old man said, tapping a bag of gummy worms on the counter.

“...No, I don't think so,” Keith said.

The bell over the door rang softly; a rush of warm summer air swept across the floor, curling around Hollis's ankles like a cat. They turned and immediately locked eyes with Jake, who stood frozen in the doorway, his shopping bag dangling from his hand. “Oh,” he said faintly. “Hey. Uh.”

“Hi,” Hollis said, their throat closing up.

Jake visibly swallowed. His eyes darted from side to side. “I left the… gummy worms. They’re -”

“Oh, are these yours?” Leo said, holding them up.

Jake nodded once. “They’re on the receipt, I just -”

“Oh, no, no worries, here,” Leo said, holding the bag out. Hollis felt as if they were standing in the no-man’s-land between two massive cannons, and they sidled towards the frozen foods aisle. They could practically feel Keith’s eyes searing into the back of their neck. “Sorry for not bagging ‘em, must’ve slipped my mind. Now scram.”

Leo’s voice was light and teasing, but Jake seemed to take it to heart. Hollis’s eyes were fixed on the barcode of a bag of frozen fries, as if they could vaporize the bag just by staring at it long enough. They didn’t see Jake leave; his footsteps, though, were like a fast patter of raindrops on the roof, and the door swung open and shut in mere seconds. He was gone.

Leo awkwardly cleared his throat. “$9.42,” he said.

“Shit, sorry - here’s your five, Hollis,” Keith called out. “I don’t need it anymore.”

The store’s air conditioning roared in their ears. Hollis drifted towards the counter, hand already outstretched, to take their ten-dollar bill. They briefly met eyes with Keith. Keith, though… he looked troubled by something. He gave them a curt nod and picked up their grocery bags. “Let’s go,” he said quietly. “Here, wanna carry this?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

* * *

See, Keith Owens had a gift.

It may not have been the best gift, but it was something all the same. Like his brother Fred, he had a knack for noticing everything he ever saw, but he didn’t always pick the right time to share what he knew. He was horrible at keeping secrets. He also sucked at remembering them. Sometimes you could trust him, and sometimes you couldn’t. It was a double-edged sword, one that cut him up and got him in trouble more often than not.

And sometimes he noticed things, and passed them through the wrong filter. He meant well. God, he meant well. Keith was Hollis’s best friend, after all, their second in command; he was just looking out for them.

It may have started from that day in Leo’s store, when Hollis vaulted over the counter to avoid being seen by Jake. Keith had been there for that. But he’d also seen the heart Jake had made with his hands at the county finals start line. He’d seen how they and Jake were attached at the hip, before the riot. They’d unpack their gear next to each other at practice; they’d grab each other snacks during competitions; they knew each other’s favorite Capri Sun flavors, knew how to fix each other’s bikes. And three nights a week, Jake would follow Hollis out into the woods, blankets and pillows in hand, only returning in the morning.

God, it was so fucking obvious.

Life wasn’t a garden, Hollis realized. You can’t just till the soil of your mind, divide it into neat furrows, plant seeds, and label the rows of memories with little signs. _Friends. Family. Firsts. Loves. Hates. Grief.  Dreams. Nightmares. Joys._ It doesn’t work like that. Not everything has a label. They would stand there for years, holding their time with Jake in their hands like a seedling in a handful of dirt, wondering where to plant it. And all the while, soil slipped through their fingers like sand down an hourglass.

What was Jake to them? What had Jake been? What _could_ he have been?

* * *

It was what Hollis loved most about their friends that, in the end, made Jake’s separation final. They were ride or die for each other, no matter what. They really were like a bunch of hornets: kill one near the nest, and the whole swarm comes down on your head. Keith made it clear to the others that Jake had done something wrong, by ratting them out to the cops - even though Jake had just wanted them all to be safe, and had gotten the Daredevils in even hotter water than his friends. Keith was a little older than Hollis, after all, and he had an eldest-brother streak that kicked into overdrive when any of the stunt club was suffering.

So that was that. They all followed Keith’s lead - and damn it, Hollis was too afraid of losing them all to step in and stop.

Jake’s exit was abrupt and unfair. He obviously didn’t want to come back. Hollis couldn’t make him want it. They couldn’t make the others want it, either, not without tearing them all apart. But it was still Jake’s choice to leave, at the end of the day.

It was time for Hollis to make some choices of their own.

* * *

First came the name change.

Some people said that “Kepler Stunt Club” was too much of a mouthful, or that it felt stale. Others figured there was no reason to keep the title - after the riot, Kepler High School pulled their support from the organization, leaving them adrift on their own. They didn’t need to be tied to the town or an institution anymore.

But that insult, rolling off Seth’s tongue, stuck with them all. A nest of buzzing hornets, he’d called them. It gave Hollis all the joy in the world to take that and throw it back in his face. After all, hornets don’t die when they sting someone. They survive, come back with a vengeance - and, if your name is Tim, send you into anaphylactic shock. Nasty sons of bitches.

So when sponsorship money started, reluctantly, rolling in from local businesses, they funneled the money into new gear with a Hornets logo on it. It was late summer. Fall was coming; Hollis could feel the withering of the world approaching, deep in their chest, and they knew it was time to gear up for winter. Boards, skis - Tim’s beat-up snowboard needed to be replaced, Jordan needed new boots - and, on the side, they were all saving up for dirtbikes.

It was a slow, bumpy start. Like frostbitten flowers in March - it wasn’t meant to start this way, or so soon, but it was starting all the same. Hollis slid into the shoes of captain like they were putting on another actor’s clothes, at first. They didn’t have Fred to look to for answers, anymore - and perhaps that was for the best, because the game was changing.

A few weeks into October, one of the Daredevils got into town and tried to vandalize one of the stores on Main Street. Someone called in a police report giving Andre’s description. The store they’d tried to fuck up, however, was Leo’s. Bad luck. Leo immediately put his foot down and rolled back security footage when the sheriff started sniffing around their practice areas. That must have been a fun drive up to Durbin, to chat with the cops in their neck of the woods.

It was so fucking stupid. They were two stunt teams in two small towns, in the middle of the boonies of eastern West Virginia. Not the Sharks and the Jets. And yet, it was mushrooming into something that Hollis quickly felt slipping out of their control. There was only so much they could do to keep the Daredevils from coming in and ruining their reputation in Kepler. The only road leading from Durbin to Kepler passed through the east side of town, by their ramps and the trailheads where they’d ride their mountain bikes.

Which was, by chance, across the street from Kepler’s local run-down dive bar: the Little Dipper.

The place was owned and operated by a elderly, mysterious relative of Cam’s and her wife. Former bikers, the both of them, with names that were probably fake and dozens of tattoos that definitely weren’t. Helen and Sammy didn’t do much business these days; the folks from Green Bank stopped coming years ago, and the place was looking a bit shabby. Every now and then, though, old friends of theirs would drive through Kepler on their way west and stop by. They were mostly old folks on massive motorcycles or tricked-out vintage cars, their mufflers roaring like lions among the trees. Hollis sometimes saw Ned Chicane standing on the front porch of the Cryptonomica, watching the old cars as they drove past with an approving glint in his eye.

Other than the old folks, Cam’s distant, distant relative didn’t get much business. And the two old women didn’t mind their shenanigans; in fact, the day Andre stacked a pyramid of old energy drink cans in front of their door, right on the stoop so nobody could come in and out, they just stood there and _laughed._ Sammy watched from the window as Helen took potshots at the pyramid with a slingshot, neatly knocking off cans one by one.

Yeah. They were cool.

* * *

A few weeks passed.

“Hm,” Helen said, behind the bar, polishing a glass and watching her wife teach the Hornets to play pool. She was stately and tall, like a noble, ancient tree. Hollis didn’t mind that she towered over them.  

“Hm what?”

“I just had a thought.”

“Good Lord, spare us.”

“Don’t talk like that to your elders, Hollis, or I’ll throw you out on your ass,” the old woman said, eyes flashing dangerously. Hollis grinned at her and sipped from their can of root beer. “D’you know what this place is turning into?”

“A cesspool of iniquity,” Hollis said dryly.

Helen laughed softly, the sound like leaves through wind. “No, dear,” she said. The way she said it, bone-dry and sarcastic, settled warm and heavy like a burning-hot drink in Hollis’s chest. “This old bar… you might say it’s becoming quite the…”

Oh, Christ. “Don’t say it,” Hollis muttered. Helen’s eyes were twinkling. “Don’t you fuckin’ say it -”

“Hornet’s nest,” she finished. Hollis slammed their can down on the bar and headed for the pool table, wielding their cue like a club. Helen’s harsh, croaking laughter echoed in their ears like a raven’s caw - and it was all they could do to keep themselves from smiling, too.

That was the thing about nicknames. Hornet’s Nest. Sprout. Boss. Holls. They stuck; they were a label, slapped on things. Some of them, Hollis didn’t want to peel off.

* * *

There was a flow to the way the Hornets shifted and grew, branched out, bloomed; the defense of their name became defense of the town, and they treated Kepler like they owned it. It takes a village to raise a child, after all, and a town to raise two, three, ten, two _dozen_ children - so let them raise the town. Let them raise drinks to the sky in celebration; let them raise new ramps and new dreams, let them raise heaven and hell in its cobblestone streets, because like it or not, Kepler was _theirs._

Bikes blazing through the street. Parkouring across the roofs. Climbing high into the trees. Picking random riverbanks to nap on. Swiping plants from neighborhood gardens. Racing through the woods on bikes, on foot, on the dirtbikes Whistles could finally sell them. It was organized, gleeful chaos.

Hollis let them. No matter how mad Sheriff Owens got; no matter how much Pigeon rolled her eyes; no matter how often Hollis thought they could feel their aunt’s furious yet worried gaze on the back of their neck. They let them all the same. And there were reasons for that.  

Without Jake by their side, they found themselves listening to the woods more: the howl of wind through trees, breaking twigs, silence where there shouldn’t be. They heard gunshots and the death throes of great dying beasts. “It’s just poachers,” Pigeon would say, scowling out the window of her trailer at the trees. “It’s just bears,” said Ranger Juno Divine, checking up on the Hornets and their ramps one day, ahead of a rainstorm that threatened to flood the Greenbrier and swamp their practice area.

Everyone said that this was just the way things were in Kepler. Hollis knew, though, the horrible power of the “way things were” - dusty hallways, hidden photo albums, pages torn out of books. The status quo could only hold them for so long before it started to chafe.

So let them roam, they thought. Let the kids blast through the woods on their bikes; let them learn every twist and turn of the forest’s trails, so they knew where to run and hide if they had to. Let them know the woods the way Hollis did. Let their Hornets fly.

* * *

On the way to their tree, the March after the riot, Hollis passed through the small field by Leo’s store and felt their toe dislodge something from the dirt.

They looked down. A chestnut, doubtlessly buried last fall by a squirrel, peeked out of the soil. Hollis took their time picking it up, carefully scraping the dirt off with their thumbnail. The seed, smooth and slightly heavy in their hands, looked a lot like a mini Snickers bar. It took all their willpower to not pop it in their mouth and start chewing on it.

There were footsteps on the sidewalk. Hollis glanced around the side of the building, and their eyebrows flew up.

Tim was heading into Leo’s store. Alone.

The kid had been almost a no-show, these past few days; every spring, he got super quiet and subdued anyway, and Hollis had never figured out why, but this year was especially different. Tim had missed the last three practices. His bike remained in the parking lot of the Hornet’s Nest, covered with a tarp. When he did come to practice, he immediately vanished afterwards; on their days off, he was nowhere in sight.

There was something up with him.

Hollis tiptoed behind Tim, stepping over the creaky floorboard on Leo’s porch, and slipped behind him before the door closed. The boy didn’t even know they were there. Hollis ignored Leo's questioning stare and tiptoed into the aisle on the other side of Tim, watching him through the cans.

Whenever spring hit, Leo stocked up the hardware section of his store with all sorts of garden supplies: hand tools, a sparse collection of vegetable and flower seeds, potting soil, fertilizer. It wasn't quite the garden section of Lowe's, but it served the town of Kepler well enough. Hollis watched through the cans as Tim made a beeline for the seeds, carefully choosing a packet.

“Afternoon, Tim,” Leo said. “Nice day out, huh?”

“Hey, mister.”

Hollis glanced over at Leo. The man stared back; his eyebrows were practically in his hairline, from how high he'd raised them. Hollis made a vague slashing gesture across their throat; Leo rolled his eyes. While the man made small talk with Tim, Hollis snuck around the front of the store to the temporary garden supplies aisle. The faint smell of fertilizer was a bit stronger here. Their fingers skimmed over the seed packets, until they got to the ones Tim had picked.

Poppies. Huh.

They set the seeds back on the rack and headed for the door - and smashed right into Tim. “Shit!” the boy yelped. “Oh, hey, Hollis. Fuck.”

“Hey yourself,” Hollis said slowly. Tim swallowed nervously, not meeting their eyes. “What’s the deal, man, why do you have those?”

“It’s a, uh. Bit of a story,” Tim said. He scuffed his foot on the floorboards. “Sorry for… not coming to practice, I’ve been busy.”

“Busy with - you know what, let’s walk and talk, I gotta stop by the Nest anyway.” Hollis put a hand on Tim’s shoulder and gently steered him out the door. Tim clutched his bag with seeds and fertilizer to his chest. The ground below the steps was spongy from last night’s rain; Hollis felt water seep into their worn combat boots. “So, what’s up?”

Tim was silent for a bit; the only sound was their two sets of footsteps, thudding on the sidewalk. “I dunno if I’ve told you about this,” he said quietly, “but I… had an uncle.”

Hollis noted the past tense and winced. Shit. They had no idea.

“Uncle Dennis was… the best,” Tim said. “Dad’s been gone a long time, and when the going started gettin’ tough for me and Mom, he stepped in and helped us out. A while back, he was out hiking and just… never came back. Cops couldn’t find any sign of him - until they found his body at the base of Mount Kepler. Got all fucked up by something, probably a bear. I was ten years old, I think.”

Hollis did the math in their head, and a faint chill went down their spine. Tim was fifteen right now; he’d have been ten in 2010, the year Hollis was 15 - the year they’d stopped coming home to the Cryptonomica. They heard Victoria’s voice, thin with worry: _The woods are dangerous._

“So, he died,” Tim sighed. “Mom and I took it hard. She gardened, back then, and...  she’d grow these,” he said, tapping the bag. “Poppies. Red ones mean remembrance, apparently. We start ‘em in mid-April, put ‘em on his grave every year in June.”

The two of them turned off of Kepler’s main street, heading along the river to the Hornet’s Nest. “So you were pickin’ up seeds for your mom?” Hollis said.

Tim grimaced. “Well,” he said, and paused.

“Well, what?”

“...They’re not for her,” Tim mumbled, looking away.

“Oh?”

“Her allergies are… real bad this year. Claritin ‘n shit stopped cutting it. The doctor told her to take a backseat on gardening for a while, until they figure out a better allergy prescription, but that means -”

“No poppies,” Hollis said with him, nodding. “Right, makes sense.”

“So I’m tryin’ to figure out how to do it myself, but I can’t grow stuff for shit.” Tim sighed heavily and stared at the road. “Seriously, Mom always told me not to touch the fuckin’ plants, because if I looked at ‘em wrong they’d start wilting.”

“Tim Tacy, plant assassin extraordinaire,” Hollis said dryly. Tim giggled. “C’mon, it’s probably not that bad.”

“It kinda is,” Tim said. He cleared his throat and looked into the bag, as if reassuring himself that the seeds were still there. When he spoke again, his voice was just above a whisper. “I just… don’t wanna fuck this up.”

They reached the parking lot of the Hornet’s Nest. Jordan was crouched next to their bike, changing the oil; in the next parking space over, Alice was running her bike, most likely preparing to do the same thing once her engine got warmed up. Tim stopped short before stepping into the parking lot, watching his teammates work. “Weird question,” he said slowly.

“Try me.”

“Boss, d’you… nah, never mind,” Tim said, making a beeline for the bar.

Hollis caught his shoulder, before he got too far away. “No question’s too weird, man, hit me,” they said.

Tim took a deep breath, still not meeting their eyes. “Yeah, okay,” he muttered. “Dumb question, but d’you know how to. Y’know. Grow shit.”

A strange feeling went up Hollis’s spine.

Tim kept talking, his voice growing higher with each second that Hollis didn’t speak. “Like, I don’t know anyone in town who can keep a plant alive for more than two weeks, and I’m shit at it, I dunno - I can’t even keep a cactus alive, I accidentally killed one of Mom’s last year when I watered it too much, and I -”

“Tim.”

Tim’s mouth snapped shut.

“I got an idea.”

“Wait, what?”

* * *

This was the plan.

Hollis was a bit rusty in the gardening department, but they still knew the basics, which they could pass down to Tim. Tim already had the materials he needed. He had to keep the flowerpot out of the house so his mom’s allergies wouldn’t flare up, though, so that complicated things a bit. March in the Monongahela was a cloudy, soggy affair on most days - but the Hornets’ Nest’s front window got some good sunlight. They’d stick the pot there, keep the soil moist, and hope for the best.

At least, that was the plan.

Tim showed up the next morning while the others were eating their pre-practice breakfast. Hollis was perched cross-legged on the bar, wolfing down a plate of scrambled eggs with onions. They didn’t notice that Tim came in until the front door slammed shut, and they heard his voice. “Hey, Hollis,” he called. “I got the - oh. Shit. Hi,” he said feebly, as the rest of the Hornets turned to him. “Sorry.”

“Tim?” said Bevin, grinning ear to ear. “Hey, bud, where’ve you been?”

Tim shifted the pot awkwardly on his hip; it was a huge terra cotta thing, maybe a foot and a half deep, and he’d already filled it with soil. Hollis’s arms burned with sympathy, imagining him lugging it across town. “I’ve been tied up,” he said lamely. “With, uh. Stuff.”

“Aw, you growin’ flowers?” Cam said, grinning.

Tim’s cheeks burned. “Yeah.”

Cam shook his head and laughed, returning to his eggs. “That’s fuckin’ adorable, man,” he said. A couple of the newer kids on the team smirked, hiding their faces with mugs of coffee. “Glad to know you’ve been growin’ pansies this whole time -”

At least half the room started snickering. Keith’s eyebrows flew up. “Poppies,” Tim muttered.

Cam didn’t hear him. “ -’stead of practicing, but hey, to each their own -”

“They’re poppies,” Tim said.

In Cam’s face, Hollis saw a reflection - their aunt, gazing out across their suddenly-lush garden with a troubled look in her eyes. They saw Tim’s jaw clench, eyes brimming with frustrated tears, and set their plate down so hard their fork rattled. “Cam,” they said. “Shut the fuck up.”

The bar fell silent. Everyone who’d been laughing - which had to be at least 15, 16 of them, Jesus fucking Christ - turned to stare. Cam slowly swallowed his mouthful of eggs, his eyes wide. “Sorry,” he whispered.

Hollis ignored him. “Wanna know something?”

“Sure?”

“When I was a kid,” they said, “I had a garden in my backyard.”

Cam’s eyebrows went up.

“Don’t look so fuckin’ surprised, man, I’m surprised the rest of you didn’t have one too,” Hollis said. “I don’t think it’s stupid.”

“We didn’t say that,” the girl on Cam’s right said faintly.

“But you were thinking it.” She grimaced and looked away. “I don’t appreciate you putting people down like that. It takes time and effort to make shit grow. Don’t knock it until you try it, and I honestly doubt you’ll ever give it a shot. Just leave him be.”

“Bet,” Keith said into his eggs.

The silence, if possible, grew even more stark. Hollis slowly turned to him. “Bet?” they repeated.

Keith pushed his eggs around on his plate for a bit. Then he looked up, startled, and said, “Shit, wait - were you talkin’ to me?”

“Yeah, who else? What do you mean, ‘bet?’”

Keith swallowed, as the eyes of everyone in the room turned to him. “I - I mean, well,” he said, “it just… I dunno. Thought of him actually… tryin’ it.”

Hollis looked at him for a long, long time. Keith could hear the wheels turning in their head and held up both hands. “No, don’t look at me,” he said, “I didn’t -”

“Y’know,” Hollis said slowly, “that’s not a bad idea, actually,”

“Are you serious?” Keith said faintly.

“You don’t knock it ‘til you try it,” Hollis said. “Yeah. Y’all were talking a big game, huh. Well, I can tell you for sure, Cam, growing stuff isn’t easy. Let’s give it a try. See what you think.”

They gestured in the general direction of town. “Run down to Leo’s, get some seeds, try and grow something. If it survives to the end of its growing season, you can knock Tim for trying to help his fucking _mother_ all you want. Jesus Christ, y’all, have some fucking respect.” Cam sheepishly bowed his head. Tim hugged the pot closer to his chest; Hollis snapped their fingers and gestured at the window. “Kid,” they said, “you can set that down on the windowsill.”

“It’s not wide enough,” he said, his voice strained.

“Yeah, what are you thinking of for this?” Jordan said. They gestured vaguely at the bar’s front window; it was big, sure, but not nearly big enough for a bunch of flowerpots. “This is a bar, not a greenhouse, what do you -”

Greenhouse.

“Boss?”

Hollis sat up. The word slammed into them like a blast of warm spring air. A hard, glowing knot of possibility tightened in their chest. Their eyes slid to the window. In their ears, they could almost hear their sister’s soft voice. _Hey, sprout - you ever think about our garden?_

“You know,” they said slowly. “Funny you should mention that. Come on.”

“Hang on, what -”

Hollis slid off the bar, their boots thumping on the wooden floor. “No, no, just follow me,” they said. “I got an idea. We’re heading to Leo’s.”

* * *

It must have been quite the sight: twenty dirtbikes creeping through town, engines roaring, clustering in the parking lot of Leo’s store like ants around a piece of fruit. Hollis watched as their Hornets shuffled into the store. “Keep moving, keep moving,” they said, gently shoving them as a traffic jam formed near the door. “They’re on the right. Take turns, you’ve got time. Hi, Leo.”

“...Hey,” Leo said, from behind the counter. “What is this, a field trip?”

“Nah,” Hollis said. “Just… rekindling an old hobby. And trying to prove a point.”

Leo glanced over Hollis’s shoulder. “Is the point that you kids are trying to tear up my store?” he said. “Because you’re doing a damn good job.”

Hollis heard metal clanking, the soft whisper of paper falling to the floor. They turned around and sighed. “Y’all,” they said flatly.

The Hornets who’d heard them looked up; some were fake-swordfighting with hand weeders, others making it rain with seed packets. Kellen was wearing a large plastic flowerpot on his head. “What the fuck? Jesus Christ, pick those seeds up, unless you’re buying them. This isn’t a strip club.”

The Hornets sheepishly picked up the seed packets. “Thanks,” Leo muttered. “Glad you’re keeping them in line, Hollis.”

“It’s like trying to waterski, man, I’m just barely holding on,” Hollis sighed. “We’re just doing some… team building, I guess. Keith, you break that, you buy it.”

“Sorry.”

“What exactly,” Leo said slowly, “is this ‘team building?’”

Hollis explained the situation as well as they could. “I just want to make sure Tim’s not alone in what he’s doing,” they said. Leo nodded slowly. “He doesn’t deserve to get dragged like that. Hell, I’m surprised more of these kids don’t know how to grow stuff. We’ve got good soil for it, we get enough rain and sunshine. You probably know people who garden a lot -”

There was a pained look in Leo’s eyes. Hollis frowned at him; he waved his hand and said faintly, “It’s fine. Had coffee on an empty stomach, no big deal.”

“Ah.”

“But yeah,” Leo said, shrugging. “I think that’ll pan out fine, as long as you got a place to keep ‘em all.”

“Oh, yeah - there’s an old, run-down greenhouse across the road from the Little Dipper,” Hollis said. That look in Leo’s eyes deepened, and they said, “Man, you sure you’re okay? You’re lookin’ a little -”

“It’s fine, really,” Leo said quickly. “Mind your kids, they’re trying to stack flowerpots.”

“Shit.” Hollis turned around and snapped their fingers a couple of times. “Hey, watch it,” they called out. “If you’ve got seeds and a flowerpot, get in line.”

“Boss, I forgot my wallet -”

“You what?” Hollis looked up and down the haphazard line. “Who else didn’t bring any money? Be honest.” A few hands went up - way more than they would have liked. Hollis sighed and covered their face. “Fuck’s sake,” they muttered into their hands. “Okay. Y’all keep track of what you bought, I _will_ come after you and you gotta pay up.” They pulled out the debit card for their sponsorship money account and tapped it on the counter. “We want a receipt with this, Leo,” they said, looking the old man right in the eyes.

Leo sighed heavily and started ringing up seed packets. “Sure, sure,” he said. “I figured as much.”

* * *

These days, Hollis could feel energy thrumming in their body that just wouldn’t go away - no matter how hard they went on the slopes, or how fast they rode their dirtbike through the woods, there was always a searing-hot kernel of _something_ in their chest. Possibility, perhaps. Or boredom. Though that couldn’t be it. The Hornets were doing well, all things considered; they were making a name for themselves regionally, grinding the Daredevils into the dirt. They’d expanded into BMX racing, upgrading their dirtbikes with prize money when they could.

The Hornets were becoming something. They were growing, they were thriving. So why was Hollis so… frozen? It was as if they were holding their breath, waiting for something in the world to fall into place; their lungs burned with the strain of it all.

But they had almost forgotten about the greenhouse.

Pigeon told them about it, once, in the weeks after their aunt had died. It had almost immediately gone out of their mind, though, with the chaos of Fred’s accident and their quick rise through the ranks. And they were so swallowed by the then-fresh pain of Jake leaving that they didn’t have the time to think about it.

The greenhouse was still there, though. Hollis had passed it dozens of times, on the way to their tree, and they always ended up leaving it behind.

But they led their Hornets there that day: past an old stump, down a faint path beaten into the dirt, boots squishing on the damp soil as the morning sun filtered down through the leaves. The twenty or so of them usually made noise like an advancing army. Last night’s rain still clung to the leaves, making puddles in the path that the Hornets gleefully splashed through.

Hollis heard a slightly larger twig snap, and Bevin quickly strode past them, staring up at the canopy as if he’d never seen the color green before in his life. He promptly walked straight into a tree. Their eyes caught a glint of sunlight on glass. “This way,” they said, swerving off the main path to a more overgrown trail. The only hint of a way through the trees was a faint slope in the earth, where the path had been worn down decades before.

It was a small building at the wide end of a large, egg-shaped clearing. The roof was overgrown with vines; clear remnants of an outdoor garden plot surrounded it. Old rose bushes, unpruned and flowerless, hugged the outside walls, and the softly curling petals of purple irises peered through the weeds like the rippling edges of a jellyfish. A half-rotted wooden table was just barely visible around the back.

Hollis felt that tightness in their chest unclench just a bit, looking at it. This was an overgrown, run-down shack, filled with bugs and broken glass and weeds - but it had so much potential. Not just for this spur-of-the-moment enforcement, but for promises they should have kept ages ago.

Time to cash that in. They’d bought cantaloupe seeds. Once they sprouted, and they cleared the garden plot outside the greenhouse, they’d be able to plant them. This was going to be fine.

* * *

So they made a life of it.

Between practices, the Hornets went into the greenhouse and scrubbed it as clean as they could. There were spiders everywhere, and James kept standing on the rickety old tables to avoid them, until Andre told him to get down. Pigeon showed up every other day with her toolbox and helped fix what she could. She helped them clear out the remnants of the garden bed outside, tearing up some of the more pesky plants with a shovel.

“Let’s keep the grapevines, though,” she said thoughtfully, the first week of April. “They could be nice.”

On one side of the greenhouse, Jordan and Alice were pulling up weeds in the old garden beds. Pigeon saw Jordan go for a clump of striped leaves, with small tufted buds like tiny artichokes on top of long stems. “Hey, no,” she exclaimed, brandishing the hand not holding the shovel at them. “Those are Star of Bethlehem plants, they’re gorgeous when they bloom. No touchie.”

“You know what they are?” Jordan said, eyebrows raised.

“‘Course I do,” Pigeon said. She lifted the shovel onto her shoulder, almost clocking Bevin in the face. “Hollis and I, we both used to garden. This shit runs in the family, huh, sprout?”

Her voice was light and teasing. Hollis’s cheeks burned as the others snickered, softly repeating the nickname among themselves. “Yeah, yeah. Don’t call me that,” they muttered. To the rest of the group, they said, “Anyone who calls me ‘sprout’ gets 40 pushups.”

The sheepish chorus of “yes, boss” was music to their ears.

“Do I have to do pushups?”

“No, Pidge.”

“What if I wanna do pushups?”

“Then you’re insane.”

“ _Me?_ Hollis, _you’re_ the one who can bench-press your dirtbike -”

“I did it once, and almost dropped it on my head,” Hollis said. “Not gonna do that again. C’mon, let’s take a look at the floor.”

The actual greenhouse, though, was basically in shambles. The old tables in there were rotted through in places; the floorboards were decomposing, creaking and falling to pieces to reveal the forest floor beneath. There were weeds growing in the gaps. Hollis saw an old birds’ nest on a windowsill.

“Well,” Pigeon said slowly. “My first thought’d be to go grab some flagstones from the public works shed, maybe some wood to build some more tables… but this ain’t a city project.” She put her hands on her hips and looked around the empty greenhouse, fingers drumming the side of her leg. The rest of the Hornets watched her, a bit apprehensive.

At last, she shrugged and turned around. “Well,” she said. “Looks like I’m goin’ to Lowes.”

She broke out the tape measure, scribbled stuff down on the inside of her wrist with an old pen, thumped the walls and checked them for soundness. Hollis watched their sister work with a faint sense of awe. Pigeon had always had a knack for working with her hands, after all - both of them did, frankly, but in different ways. Hollis had their garden and their bikes; Pigeon had the construction she’d do in public works. They each had their talents.

In the end, it was Pigeon who helped them raise the place. She cleared out the rotted wood and floorboards; Hollis tagged along with her to the Lowes in Lewisburg and chipped in to pay for the replacement windows and flagstones, as well as cinderblocks and boards. She came in and delegated tasks like the general of an army. Jordan and James helped her lay gravel and flagstones. Pigeon and Keith handled replacing the windows, making sure there was a solid seal against the rain, while the others stacked cinderblocks and braced boards across them to make tables.

It was a lot of work. A lot of weekends they could’ve spent practicing went into it; there were a few jammed fingers and stubbed toes, and one unfortunate incident with a staple gun that had half the Hornets frantically asking Kellen if he’d gotten a tetanus shot. But it was worth it in the end. A lot of work to prove a point to Cam, but it was absolutely worth it.

* * *

Halfway through April, when the greenhouse was finally done, they started moving in the pots from the Hornets’ Nest. Hollis watched as the Hornets elbowed each other, trying to find the best spots for their seeds. They had old bedsheets hung up in one corner to block the sun, for the shade-loving plants, as well as makeshift trellises and stands for when Keith’s green beans started growing.

There were all kinds of seeds ready to grow here. Flowers, vegetables, a few herbs. Hollis had their own pot: some cantaloupe seeds, ready to transplant to the cleared plot outside when they sprouted. Pigeon was going to be happy about that. They hung back by the door, waiting for the crowd to clear. The flowerpot weighed on their arms, making them burn.

What seeds would Jake have chosen?

Hollis slammed the thought out of their mind as fast as they could. They ducked into the greenhouse, put their pot on the nearest shelf, and slipped out. They went to the nearest tree they could find and leaned against it, closing their eyes. A cool spring breeze rustled the leaves, as if the forest was breathing in.

* * *

It took a few months for Tim’s flowers to grow.

When they did, Hollis watched as he carefully cut them out of their pots, tying them in a haphazard bouquet with some twine. The flowers were a little scraggly, a little wilted; he overdid it on the watering, then held back too much, and the leaves were looking a bit yellow.

But the bouquet was still beautiful. It wasn’t much, but it was the best Tim could do.

Hollis followed Tim to Kepler’s graveyard from a distance, watching him out of the corner of their eye. Tim knew exactly where to go; they could almost sense him counting rows and headstones, bouquet clutched anxiously in front of him. As he took his time by his uncle’s grave, they wove through the rows at the opposite end of the graveyard, skimming over the names. Jones. Harlan. Cobb. McLaughlin. Anderson. Some were marked with blank stones, nameless and faceless.

Hollis found themselves walking faster. Scanning the names. _Wilson, Wilson -_ it rose up like a tide behind their teeth, roaring in their ears. Their aunt had never told them where their parents had been buried, if they’d been buried at all - but this was the only cemetery in Kepler. Their eyes skimmed over the headstones so fast their vision blurred.

“Hollis?”

They stopped short. Tim was standing on the other side of their row of graves; he stared at them, eyes wide, arms crossed tightly across his chest. His oversized yellow-and-black jacket swallowed him up, covering his hands. Hollis strongly suspected it was actually Bevin’s. “You okay, boss?” he said faintly.

Hollis’s chest heaved; they closed their eyes, feeling their heart pound in their ears. “Yeah,” they croaked. “It’s… yeah. I was just looking for something.”

“You need a minute?” Tim said.

Hollis shook their head. They jammed their hands deep into their leather jacket’s pockets and stepped over the short, uneven headstone, to Tim’s side of the row. “Nah,” they said. “I’ll be good. I’ll live.”

* * *

Years later, Hollis would look back and know that this was where things truly changed.

In a strange way, the Hornets seemed to be doing better. After the greenhouse, they brought in more prize money; they won more competitions, went higher, further, faster than anyone else in the area. And yet, they all still took chunks out of their spring to get plants started in the garden. Even Cam got into it; he had a few false starts, but eventually managed to grow some basil that first summer.

Nobody found it strange that Alice’s watermelons stayed alive long into October, or that Kellen could start his dahlias as early as February. And Hollis’s tomato vines always bore more fruit than Keith could cook down into chili or pasta sauce. They saved a few until they rotted to throw at cop cars as they drove past.

Tim always grew flowers. Poppies, usually, but he did have a couple of thriving snapdragon pots. Those were always easy to grow. He bought more seeds than he had room to plant, and Hollis was curious about that - until one day they caught him and Bevin coming back from Snowshoe, giggling helplessly, dirt on their knees and empty plastic bags in their pockets. The next month, they overheard Ranger Duck Newton coming out of the Kepler Coffee Company, telling his coworker Juno about the Raven Golf Club’s sudden infestation of local wildflowers on the green. Those bastards were tough, and they wouldn’t go away anytime soon.

Strangely enough, Duck sounded super happy about the golf club’s new problem. Hollis gave Tim a high five and some extra money for seeds the next time they saw him.

Jordan had gone out and pruned the life back into the rosebushes around the greenhouse. They’d gone to the library and checked out all the books they could on rose care, using their mom’s old library card, and then conveniently forgot to return them. The spring of 2016, the hardy old roses started coming back in glorious colors: blood red, peach, yellow, even a few orange and purple ones that everyone was surprised to see.

They took special care of the red ones. That summer, when they bloomed, Jordan cut a neat bouquet of twelve red roses and handed them to Alice, still damp from the garden and dusted with soil. “Wanna get some coffee?” they said, smiling nervously. Alice just took the bouquet from them and slipped her hand into theirs.

Every single one of them came back, every year, to plant something. This wasn’t a life that Kepler expected of them. Only a fool would say that Hollis didn’t know this. It was a contingency they were always prepared for.

The Hornets already had a reputation as delinquents in town: people who destroyed, who stunted through the forests and scraped moss off the trees and uprooted saplings on accident, much to the chagrin of the local forest rangers. (Hollis made them replant every single one, though.) The Hornets were already looked down on a bit for being so dangerous, so rowdy and wild; some said they gave the town a bad name.

In the end, it had the same stuff at the roots. The Hornets had a reputation for destruction; Hollis wanted a reputation for creation.

Perhaps they’d done this to grow a life without Jake - to make something fresh, new, unsullied by the past. Cut it down to the roots, till the earth. Start over. They wanted to grow a world without fear. Hollis didn’t realize it then, but they’d been growing a world in which Jake would have been welcome again. He would have been perfect for this.

Some gangs hazed, others had complicated and cruel tests. Hollis just led their new recruit to the greenhouse, gave them a shovel and some seeds, and pointed them at an empty flowerpot. “Make it grow,” they said, leaving them to their defenses, with only old manuals on how to care for plants - painstakingly torn from botany books and magazines - to guide them.

It was a rite of passage, of sorts. Let the seed grow; prove you cared for the world you walked on, without leaving it to wither and die. That put some people off. A few new kids from Kepler High joined the Hornets, expecting baseball bats and egging cop cars - your basic juvenile delinquency. Sure, they did throw rotten tomatoes at Sheriff Owens whenever they could, and sometimes they did parkour or rode their bikes where they shouldn’t.

The days of property damage weren’t just over, though; they had never started. Kepler was theirs, after all. It was their seedling, to protect and nurture. The least they could do was leave it be. The seed tradition put off some of their potential recruits, but that was alright. Good riddance.

After all, it was of the people and for the people in this little community of theirs; this was just the way things were done. You can’t care about people without loving every part of them. And this garden, this greenhouse, was part of all of them, like it or lump it.

It’s the ones who stayed, after seeing the greenhouse, that became the strongest. They became part of the Hornets family.

And it took time. But they grew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "Nina Cried Power" by Hozier: _"It's not the shade we should be cast in / It's the light and it's the obstacle that casts it / It's the heat that drives the light / It's the fire it ignites / It's not the waking, it's **the rising**_ ".
> 
> I LIVE
> 
> i don't have much to say right now bc i have to go run some errands, but yeah! we are almost done with this bad boy!! i hope you all enjoyed this. drop me a line in the comments or [at my tumblr](https://taako-waititi.tumblr.com), i'd love to hear your thoughts! this was a tough chapter to get out, but I still had a lot of fun with it. thanks so much for reading!


	4. A Thousand Teeth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for canon-typical gore and discussion of death/loss. This chapter brought to you by the following songs, in order of appearance:
> 
> \- ["Safe Now," Henry Jackman](https://open.spotify.com/track/09OsZ4BlDXp67SKaGBvEUR?si=xMGg5BLUThqBqUhD8l2SMg)  
> \- ["Life On Earth," Snow Patrol](https://open.spotify.com/track/0Cr8sOkVQqYexxiT7xRwRk?si=jQwWhhzIQHmI-qR-4rtpKQ)  
> \- ["An Toll Dubh (Arr. Marcus Warner)," Calum MacDonald](https://open.spotify.com/track/1dfu8wmEwpB90L0HcNDyDu?si=v9qBKcBrSymqoQF-KBNG1A)  
> \- ["Prologi," Lasse Enersen](https://open.spotify.com/track/6pTPYRzW9Oi21rEFA9aBKj?si=UMKLWm4TRvud03eGnLQsaw)
> 
> Find these and others [here, on the official TSG playlist.](https://open.spotify.com/user/dtw172966pmcf2qabxramdtpr/playlist/7GMWUC2qzG5W9ocl1StUYi?si=uWF70iHVS-uC8Er7YnU4uQ)

_ Three years later: _

A clear and starry sky shone over the salt-scattered parking lot outside of the Hornets’ Nest. 

It was just past midnight, late in February of 2019; the air was crisp with the promise of fresh snow. Hollis stood near the front door, looking out over their dirtbikes with a critical eye. In one hand they held a mug of Helen’s special blend of chai tea. It tasted like sweet gunpowder, burning a warm trail down into their stomach.

Across the parking lot, the Hornets’ Nest’s lights gleamed on the rear end of their mooning garden gnome. Keith had gleefully bought it from the Summersville Walmart, putting it proudly on a tree stump to harass anyone who drove past. It was growing on everyone. Hollis themselves didn’t mind it.

The two pricks of light glancing off the gnome’s rear end moved.

Hollis slowly lowered their cup. Inside, they could hear Cam crowing over his shuffleboard winnings, as well as some Hornets belting out tunes at the karaoke machine. Bevin and Tim were sharing a plate of pizza rolls at a table near the door, swapping filthy jokes and laughing at Keith’s attempts to play darts.

The reflections moved again. 

No, they flickered, like two blinking eyes.

A shadow walked out of the woods: a human figure, draped in what looked like soaked-through winter clothes. Their scarf slithered off their neck and fell onto the road, all at once in a damp pile. Hollis felt themselves relax and slowly lifted their cup again, taking a sip of tea. This bar was the only open place for miles around. If someone had fallen through the iced-over Greenbrier, Hollis wasn’t going to stand in the way of them warming up.

The person shuffled across the parking lot, splashing through the half-melted slurry in the parking lot’s potholes. “Evening,” Hollis said, as they dragged themselves up the stairs.

There was a flash of blonde hair. The person turned and looked at them, face half-hidden by the shadows within their hood, and walked into the Hornet’s Nest without a word.

A cold, twisting feeling sunk into Hollis’s stomach. They set their mug down on the porch railing and turned -

\- in time to see a bloody body go sailing through the front window and into a row of bikes.

Glass shattered inside the bar; there was screaming, crying, the telltale sound of a table snapping in half. Hollis stared at the body, draped over the bloody bikes - from this far away, and at this time of night, they couldn’t see who it was, but something about the build… Alice? Andre? Hell, maybe even Tim?

_ “Bevin!” _

No, that was Tim. Inside the Hornet’s Nest, something exploded, and half the lights in the building went dark. Hollis sprinted into the bar, heart thumping in their throat. People were fleeing out every exit they could; they pushed against the tide, trying to get inside to where they’d heard the scream. Inside, Keith lay unconscious on the floor, his hand bleeding from a smashed bottle. Above him, standing victoriously on the table, loomed a massive figure, blood and unspeakable things leaking from its teeth. A strip of black and yellow cloth hung from its lower jaw. In its hand, or perhaps its great clawed paw, was a mangled unmoving corpse.

“Hollis!”

They glanced at the bar. Helen stood behind it, holding a baseball bat; her wife wielded a hunting rifle behind her. The beast snarled and dropped the body in its hand; it hit the wooden floor with a loud  _ squelch.  _ The stench of blood clawed its way into Hollis’s lungs. 

Helen made the briefest of eye contact with Hollis and threw the baseball bat at them. They caught it in both hands, shifted their grip, and swung at the monster.

They missed. It barreled out the door, tearing it off its hinges, and charged across the parking lot on all fours. Hollis gritted their teeth and followed it, jumping on their dirtbike and zooming off into the woods.

* * *

It got away.

They screeched to a halt in a nameless empty clearing; shadows flickered in the clouded moonlight. Chest heaving, hands clenched tight around the handlebars, they stared around the clearing. The beast was nowhere in sight - but the clearing seemed full, teeming with something partly invisible. Shadows fell in strange places; moonlight bent and stopped in the wrong ways.

There was something in the center of this clearing. Something that Hollis couldn’t see.

They heard sirens from the west: the police heading for the bar, most likely, if Helen or Sammy or someone had called an ambulance. Hollis dragged their bike around and sped off to the Hornets’ Nest again. A soft drizzle began to fall.

* * *

Hollis blasted back into the parking lot just as the ambulances took off: two of them, horns blaring and lights flashing red and blue in the trees. A few cop cars were there, too, along with a fire truck; the firefighters were giving some of the Hornets first aid. Helen was nowhere in sight, but Sammy was sitting on the hood of a cop car wearing a shock blanket, staring fixedly at a patch of snow.

“What happened?” Deputy Dewey said to Hollis, standing on the clearest patch of asphalt he could find. The snow around him was soaked crimson with blood.

“I don’t fuckin’ know,” Hollis snarled, over the rumble of their bike’s engine. “Something just marched right in and destroyed the place -”

The lights kept flickering inside the Hornets’ Nest. Hollis’s heart stopped as Sheriff Owens came out, carrying Keith’s body with another officer. They lay him out in the back seat of his squad car; firefighters helped Jordan, who had bandages around their head, into the front passenger seat, and the car took off. 

Hollis looked at Deputy Dewey. “You guys are gonna take everyone who got hurt to the hospital, right?” they said sharply.

“Yeah,” the man said. “We got ‘em handled -”

Hollis revved their engine before he could finish. “Hey, everyone,” they yelled across the lot. The Hornets looked up.  “If you’re able, get on your bikes. We’re followin’ the ambulance.”

“It’s one in the fuckin’ morning!” Dewey warbled, eyes wide. “Are you  _ nuts?” _

Hollis rolled their eyes. “Get a grip, Dewey, your sirens woke up everyone within 50 miles of here,” they said curtly. Around the parking lot, toppled bikes were picked up and turned on; headlights switched on one by one, and a low rumble filled the air, sending ripples across the puddles in the asphalt. “Alright, we’re moving out.”

“Wait -”

Deputy Dewey’s voice was lost in the sound of their dirtbikes. By the time he got in his car to follow them, they were long gone.

Their engines thundered off the buildings of Kepler, as they followed the ambulances to the hospital. After parking their bikes, though, everyone just gravitated towards each other again. Hollis tugged their friends close and stood on tiptoes, counting heads in the crowd. 

It echoed - God, this echoed, like a scream in a mine shaft. This was a familiar scene, played out in countless parking lots, warmup areas, ski lifts across the state. The kids were prone to wandering off; Hollis would do whatever they can to make sure they were all accounted for. 

They opened their mouth -

“Wilson.”

Sheriff Owens’ curt voice sliced through the crowd. Hollis glanced up. Everyone fell silent. Kellen squirmed next to Hollis; Hollis put a hand on his shoulder. “Sheriff,” they said tensely. “What is it?”

“Were all members of the stunt club present at the Little Dipper, during the attack?” the man said, pulling out a notepad.

“Yeah,” Hollis said. “Full house.”

The sheriff scribbled that on his notepad. “When you get a chance,” he said, “I’m gonna need to talk to all -”

Hollis cut him off with a hand gesture. They snarled, “I’m trying to do a headcount, mister, cut me some fucking slack here.” The sheriff’s jaw visibly clenched. They turned their back on him. and called out, their voice choked, “Sound off. We’re doing a count. I’ll start - one.”

There was silence. “One,” Hollis repeated, something cold and sharp worming into their chest. “We’re counting off, y’all,  _ one -” _

“Two’s Keith.”

Tim’s voice was soft, near Hollis’s elbow. “He got knocked out, he’s in the ER, remember?” he whispered. “He’s fine.”

Fuck. Of course - Keith was two, the lieutenant, the second in command. Hollis swallowed hard, feeling a bitter taste in the back of their throat. God, they were losing focus. “Thanks,” they whispered. Louder, they said, “Who else do we know is in the ER?”

“Bevin,” Tim said right away. “12.”

“Kellen, 18.”

“Portia, 10.”

Jordan’s back was to them; they were scanning the parking lot, eyes wide, hands gripping their head. Hollis felt something sick and steely in their stomach, and tried to calm themselves. Alice was probably in the ER, and Jordan just hadn’t heard them. “Okay, keep them in mind. Count off,” Hollis said. 

They tried to keep their voice from shaking, but it still screeched harshly on the last word. They found themselves dreading the silence that might come, every time someone said a number. Tim’s grip was like handcuffs on their wrist. All the while, Sheriff Owens stood there, listening to the count. Faint, shaking voices, numbers lifted into the silent February night. He took notes on a notepad. When it was over, he slowly turned and shambled back towards the hospital.

* * *

In hindsight, Hollis should have known the ones who’d been killed on sight. They were both so different, in size and stature, that there was no reason why they couldn’t have figured it out.

Cam had died in the bar, torn to shreds next to the shuffleboard table, his winnings still clutched in his hand. Alice was the one thrown through the window. Numbers 9 and 17. The silence in the countdown where their numbers had gone hit everyone like a cannonball in the chest. Jordan had sunk to their knees in the parking lot and just  _ cried. _

The coroner’s reports were released the next morning; they couldn’t even see it firsthand, finding out only through the  _ Lamplighter  _ as the sun rose over a quiet, uneasy Kepler. Hollis knew it was too much to ask, that they’d died quickly and painlessly. It was anything but. 

When they finished reading the news article, they stood up without a word and left the Hornets’ Nest. The others fell upon the newspaper, trying to see what it said. Andre looked up as Hollis charged through the shattered door. “Hollis, where are you going -”

“Boss, wait -”

Their voices slid off them, past them, lost in the crunch of rock salt under their feet. Hollis felt their skin crawling as they strode across the parking lot, into the bare-limbed trees on the other side of the road. The garden gnome and its stump were blanketed in fresh snow. The world blurred around them - twigs snapping, the winter air burning their lungs like cold iron.

Mauled. The “victims,” aged 19 and 20, were “mauled” by an “unknown animal.” Angry tears burned down Hollis’s throat. That wasn’t fucking fair. They had names, damn it - they had  _ names,  _ and  _ lives. _ They were their family. 

There was Cam Bensler, Sammy and Helen’s grand-nephew. He had a peanut allergy and four blond hairs, though the rest of his hair was brown, and his father’s old boombox was set up in his bedroom, where he’d play Foreigner tapes and Streetlight Manifesto CDs long into the night. His CD had “gotten stuck” on a recording of “What’s New, Pussycat?” once, and Bevin had nearly strangled him.

And Alice Schwender - God, Alice, she had a knife collection that would make an assassin proud, and Hollis always swore that someday she’d make it to the Olympic alpine ski team. There was never a day she wasn’t whistling or humming some song she’d picked up on the radio. Sometimes Hollis remembered her and Jordan whistling a song, harmonizing together, giggling when Jordan overshot the harmony in the chorus of “Jolene.” Like two songbirds, they were.

The newspaper wouldn’t write that down. Nobody would remember it, nobody would care but them - the ones left behind. The victims, aged 19 and 20. That was all the two would be anymore.

The greenhouse door slammed shut behind Hollis, before they even realized they’d gone in. The cinderblock tables were empty; they’d moved the perennial recruitment plants, planted all those years ago when Tim had asked for help with his poppies, to the back room of the bar for the winter. Hollis slumped back against the door, staring at the empty tables and withered leaves on the paving stones.

The greenhouse was silent. In the distance, a car without a muffler roared past - almost inaudible through the greenhouse’s thick glass. Nobody would hear them here. 

How could this have happened? How could they have  _ let  _ this happen?

Hollis slowly slid to the floor, their back braced against the door, and started to cry.

* * *

Once they got it together again, they went to the hospital to pick up Keith. They’d evaluated him for a concussion and sent him on his way, along with Kellen, Portia, and Bevin. Cam’s and Alice’s bodies were in the morgue, nowhere to be seen.

On the walk back to town, Keith said softly, “Hollis, I gotta tell you something.”

He’d been quiet for most of the walk. Hollis didn’t blame him for his silence; he’d taken a hell of a whack to the head, to the point that he’d be on pain meds for at least another week and a half. Keith was weaving slightly as he walked down the street; the poor man was tired as hell. 

Hollis grabbed his arm to steady him. “What’s up, buddy?” they said quietly.

It took a long time for Keith to speak; when he did, his voice was barely above a whisper. “Last December,” he said, “I saw something. In the woods.”

Hollis’s grip tightened on his arm. “What,” they whispered. “What did you see.”

Keith swallowed audibly and looked over his shoulder. “I - not here,” he said. “Let’s get back home, I gotta… not here.”

They hurried back to the Hornets’ Nest as fast as they could. Everyone was already there to welcome Keith back; Hollis felt the grimly cheerful atmosphere change dramatically when Keith stumbled through the door. “We got a problem,” Keith said out loud.

“Sit down, man, let’s talk about it,” Hollis said, gently guiding him to the closest table. On habit, they skirted the patch of the floor where the shuffleboard table had been.

Once Keith was seated, he took a deep breath. “There’s something out there,” he told the bar, his voice shaking. “That trailer, at Eastwoods. Three folks were hangin’ around in there - that new girl, Aubrey, plus Ranger Newton and Ned Chicane. There was somethin’ inside, too, another man - and I didn’t get a real good look at him, but it looked like he  _ changed  _ into somethin’ else, you get me?”

Across the table from him, Hollis said nothing.

Keith swallowed, eyes distant and afraid. “And - and - somethin’ tried to kill me,” he whispered. “Big, giant-ass goatman with a shovel clocked me in the head.”

“Keith, are you sure,” Kellen began. He had a brace on his sprained wrist.

“Oh, I’m sure,” Keith said, eyes wide. “I’m fuckin’ sure. Look.” He turned around and lifted his hair, exposing the back of his head. Everyone winced; there was a noticeable scar there, zagging through his hair. “Got me right across the back of the head,” he said.

“Ouch,” Hollis said. Then, they realized something. “Wait - December, you said?”

“Yeah.”

“Before Christmas - Keith, is that why you came back with your leg fucking  _ broken _ ?” Hollis said, their eyebrows flying up. Keith looked down at the table. “And you didn’t tell us what the fuck happened to you?”

“You wouldn’t have believed me,” Keith said to the table.

“Well, we would’ve listened,” Hollis said, shaking their head. “Man,  _ December -  _ that was -”

“Also, I was kinda… threatened with internal combustion.”

Silence. “With what?” Lyra said flatly.

“Think he means spontaneous,” Kellen muttered to Tim.

“You were threatened,” Hollis said loudly, ignoring everyone else’s soft conversation. “By who?”

Keith was silent for a long, long time. Hollis could practically see the balances tipping in his head, weighing choices, weighing truth against fear. “Keith,” Hollis said softly. “Who threatened you?”

At last, Keith spoke. “They took me to Amnesty Lodge,” he whispered. The bar fell silent. “I - I woke up in the basement, and she was sittin’ right next to me, Hollis, she - she told me to shut up, or she’d burn me from the inside out.”

“Who?”

He looked up. “Aubrey,” he said. “That girl we met on the slopes, when we were shootin’ the video. Hollis, she can do magic. Real shit. She fuckin’ healed me, dragged me back from the brink of death, and threatened to shove me back over if I said a word.”

Hollis slowly breathed out.

“She was gonna fuckin’ kill me if I said anything,” Keith said, and now Hollis could see the panic in his eyes. They could practically feel it rolling off him in waves. “Our deal was, I sit down and shut up and not breathe a word of - of - the fuckin’ Mothman, or goatmen tryin’ to kill us in the wods, or whatever - I’d shut up, and she’d get me to a hospital and all fixed up. If I blabbed, she’d light me up like a fuckin’ Molotov. But I…”

Keith shook his head. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” he whispered. “Cam and Alice are dead, and I think the Lodge knows what killed them. I don’t - I can’t keep this under wraps anymore. I never should have to begin with. I don’t want to be a part of that fuckforsaken secret anymore. They’re hidin’ something.”

Something hot and heavy was settling in Hollis’s chest. Their blood roared in their ears. “They are,” they murmured. Their mind drifted: to gunshots in the woods, crashes, deaths, dying things. Secondhand images of what Tim’s uncle’s body must have looked like, lying at the foot of Mount Kepler. And older memories, too, of missing pages from books and run-down exhibits. Silence.

Hollis had too much experience with things like this to just sit here. They knew the danger that a kept secret could cause; this was censorship, this was lies, and innocent people had paid the price with their lives.

This would not stand.

Hollis stood up from the table; the chair legs screeched across the wood, and everyone winced. “They’re not gonna do shit,” they said. “They  _ haven’t  _ done shit.” 

“They sure haven’t,” Tim said, voice thin. Hollis looked up at him; his face was white. They wondered if he’d started to connect the dots, too. 

“I know Alice would’ve marched up to Amnesty Lodge and stuck one of her knives in their pretty wooden door by now,” Jordan said hoarsely. Everyone nodded solemnly. “We can’t just sit on our asses when the killer is still out there. Fuck’s sake, that’s what  _ they’ve  _ been doin’ to us for years.”

“We don’t know  _ that,”  _ Keith said. “I don’t - they might’ve been around for a while, but I don’t know how long it might’ve been -”

“We do.”

Everyone turned and stared at the back of the bar. Helen and Sammy were standing behind it, the planes of their face stony and harsh in the half-lit room. Hollis remembered, far too late, how long they’d been in this town - doubtlessly as long as their aunt had been. And they’d never thought to ask them what they knew. “You what?” they said softly.

Sammy’s jaw clenched; her eyes were red, gleaming with barely-suppressed rage. “That Lodge,” she said, “has been nothin’ but fishy business since 1988. The forest’s never been right since that year. People turnin’ up missin’, folks from out of town movin’ in…”

“And those deaths in ‘95,” Helen croaked. A chill went down Hollis’s spine. She crossed her long arms tightly across her chest; the black feathers tattooed down her biceps rippled. “That’s when things got locked down even worse, when the Wilsons died.”

Hollis saw the flicker of faces turning towards them; their name was no secret among their friends. “My parents,” they said. “They - yeah, they died in ‘95. My aunt always said it was an accident -”

Sammy scoffed. “Of course she did.”

“I’m not sayin’ I believed her,” Hollis said. “That stopped a long time ago.” Helen’s mouth twitched in a wry smile. “But are you - my aunt never liked those folks at the Lodge, do you think they might have something to do with it?”

“Apparently the Mothman exists, anything is possible,” Keith muttered. Hollis shot him a sharp glance, and he winced. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

But Keith was right. Anything was possible. Anything could happen. Something burst through the doors of the Hornets’ Nest and killed Cam and Alice; something huge and unseen lurked in that moonlit clearing at the center of the woods; something might have killed their parents all those years ago. 

And Hollis remembered the woods - the roar of windswept trees above them at the finish line, the peaceful thrum of unspoken words in their veins every time they fell asleep behind their sugar maple. That translator without input, clicking, clicking, turning over like an old engine, only ceasing when they went so deep into the woods that civilization forgot itself.

Kepler was strange, that was for sure. But Hollis never knew how deep that went. Perhaps it was time to find out, before anyone else got hurt by it. 

“Looks like,” they said to the bar, “we might have to do this ourselves.”

A cruel, gleeful smile spread across Jordan’s face.

“Let’s go. We have work to do.”

* * *

It was challenging, getting out of the lot and through the center of town while holding makeshift and  _ very  _ conspicuous weapons, but it didn’t matter at this point. Hollis rode at the front of the pack, helmet on, their bat wedged awkwardly between their knee and the side of their bike. Horrible positioning, they knew, but this wasn’t stunting. This was a message; this was war.

In the parking lot, their idling engines were like the rumbling of an avalanche. The big doors of Amnesty Lodge creaked open, and a small cluster of people stepped out: Duck, Aubrey, Ned Chicane, an older woman, a burly, shy-looking man Hollis didn’t know. They squinted and shielded their faces from the bright glare of their headlights. A brief ripple of panic seemed to go through them, as they realized just who was standing in front of them.

Good.

Hollis tugged off their helmet and approached the front stairs, holding their baseball bat in one hand and their helmet in the other. “So,” they said curtly. “You all heard about what happened at our place last night, right?”

“Yeah,” Aubrey said.

“...Yep,” Duck said, drawing out the word. “Real sorry about it.”

“Yeah, it’s awful,” Hollis said icily. They adjusted their grip on their baseball bat. “So Keith told me everything about the monsters. Told me that you all... work to fight them and keep it a big secret.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Aubrey said defiantly.

But there was a panicked glint in her eyes, a strange tightness to her jaw - she knew, she knew everything beyond a shadow of a doubt. Hollis scoffed. “Okay,” they said. “Well. Good news. You don’t need to know what I’m talking about anymore.”

The older woman at the back of the group opened her mouth to speak, but remained silent.

“You are all relieved of duty,” they said, the words like motor oil on their tongue. “We’ll take it from here.”

The shock and panic in all their eyes was like the weight of a club in their hand: it fueled them, strengthened them, it was  _ satisfying  _ to know that they’d scared them enough to start caring. Their words were the proverbial fire under Amnesty Lodge’s collective ass, and oh, they were so glad to be finally striking the match. 

Aubrey laughed nervously; Hollis looked sharply at her, but she wouldn’t meet their eyes. “Monsters! Are you kidding me?” she scoffed. “I told Keith. He - listen. He got a bonk on the head when he crashed off his bike. We found him like that.”

Hollis kept their face as still as possible, as Aubrey kept talking.

“He was in a daze. I think he might have a concussion. You know how that is; you do stunts, right? Concussions have to be a major worry for you guys. He kept going on and on about monsters and stuff,” she said, gesturing broadly - her smile too wide, not reassuring enough, far too anxious. “And, I don’t know. Ha ha! Monsters!”

She was transparent as the mountain air. Hollis knew too much already; there was no reason why they couldn’t trust Keith on what he’d told them, none at all. Aubrey was determined to lie her way out of it - so they turned to the one person in town they knew couldn’t tell a lie if they paid him to.

As Duck Newton squirmed under their gaze, Hollis said, “I want to hear it from him.”

Duck swallowed visibly and opened his mouth -

“Stop.”

Everyone on the porch, except for Hollis, jumped as the older woman spoke. Her eyes were closed against the dirtbikes’ harsh headlights; her face was lined and weary, and Hollis saw faint scars brushing from the base of her jaw into her hair. Her mouth was twisted as if she’d just bitten into a lemon. At last, she opened her eyes and looked directly at Hollis, and the pained look in them made them want to step back. “We’ll talk about this,” she said quietly.

Ned’s eyes widened. “Mama, are you serious -”

“This doesn’t concern y’all anymore, Ned,” the woman said. “Not you, either, Duck ‘n Aubrey. Head on downstairs, or hit the road, I don’t care.” She reached behind her and opened the door. “We gotta have a chat anyway, Mx. Wilson. On one condition.”

“What’s that,” they said flatly.

“Send your kids on home,” Mama said wearily. “We don’t have any monsters here, and I’d rather not have y’all beatin’ the hell out of my friends. I’ll tell you everything -”

“Mama -”

“She’s right.”

The other man, who Hollis didn’t know - only in passing - spoke at last, his voice soft and almost melancholy. “Mama’s gotta chat with Hollis about stuff pertainin’ to them, I assume,” he said, giving Mama a sharp look. She nodded once. Ned was staring at him as if he’d suddenly sprouted antlers. “That seems like a fair exchange. Send your army home, and she’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

“Everything she  _ claims  _ I need to know,” Hollis pointed out. Duck grimaced and looked at the ground. “Which, if your track record with this town is any indication, isn’t going to be much.”

“If you have questions,” Mama said quietly, “I’ll do my best to answer them.” She looked them in the eye. “As much as I appreciate the offer to ‘take it from here,’ there’s a hell of a lot you don’t know.”

“No thanks to you,” Hollis said. “There’s a hell of a lot of innocent blood on your hands, thanks to not telling us the truth -”

“And there’s going to be innocent blood on yours, if you don’t _ listen to me,”  _ Mama said, her voice rising. Hollis blinked. “I’m serious. Please, just - send them home, and we’ll talk, I swear.”

They stared at each other in silence for a long moment. Aubrey started fidgeting with a loose thread on the hem of her jacket, not meeting Hollis’s eyes. At last, they sighed and turned around, making a vague shoo-ing gesture at the Hornets. “Beat it,” they said. “Go to the Nest, go hang out in town, whatever. Keep an eye out for anything suspicious.”

As their dirtbikes started up and the Hornets drifted reluctantly from Amnesty Lodge, Mama nodded once and went back into the Lodge. Hollis followed her, their baseball bat on their shoulder. 

Mama headed straight for an office to the left of the main door; she held the door open and gestured in. Hollis strolled in and leaned their baseball bat against the front of her desk. “Nice place,” they said.

“Thanks, we make do,” she said with a huff, sinking into her office chair. “Take a seat, if you want. We got a lot of ground to cover.”

Hollis did not sit down. "With all due respect,” they said, “which I, frankly, think is none, why the fuck am I supposed to believe a single word you say ‘bout this?"

Mama said nothing. She just sat down, folded her hands on the table, and watched them with an unreadable look on her face. It made Hollis grit their teeth with rage. "What’ve you done for any of us? Why aren't - my friends are half out of their mind with grief, Bevin's still in the hospital, Cam and Alice are  _ dead -” _

Their voice screeched harshly on the last word. They took a deep breath, feeling as if they were drowning. “And - and you - what have  _ you  _ done? Jack shit, that's all!"

“We’ve done everything we could,” Mama said. “We didn’t expect that abomination to move so fast -”

“But you still  _ expected  _ it.”

“Well, yeah -” 

“You knew it was going to come.”

“We did, but we didn’t know where it would go, I swear,” Mama said, leaning forward. Hollis gritted their teeth and looked away. “Hollis, your friends weren’t the only ones to die from this.”

“That’s comforting.” It was anything but. Fuck, that had to be the worst thing to say; it was all Hollis could do from standing up and walking right out. 

“Duck had a friend,” Mama said. “Richard Dannon, worked with the forest service, prunin’ trees and stuff. The most recent monster ran ‘im off the road into the trees, and he crashed, hard. Your buddy’s little brother, Calvin Owens -” Hollis blinked. “He almost got ate by somethin’ in Kepler High School’s pool, last October. And I’ve lost so, so many... we’ve been hunting monsters -”

“Hiding monsters,” they muttered.

“- and we - that’s not - listen,” Mama sighed, putting both hands on her desk. “Hollis. I’m gonna have to give you a breakdown of this, before you make up your mind. You don’t know the whole story. I knew your parents, and they would go runnin’ off, guns blazin’, at every threat they saw -”

It took a while for the words to sink in. But when they did, Hollis felt them deep, as if they’d had their dirtbike dropped on their chest. “What,” they breathed. “Stop. Stop. You knew my parents?”

Mama seemed to grind to a halt, as her brain caught up with what she’d been saying. When she did, though, Hollis saw a visible change in her; she sighed, closed her eyes, and stared at her desk. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “I knew them.”

They lifted their chin defiantly. “Prove it.”

“Your Aunt Victoria was my cousin,” Mama went on, and Hollis’s mouth snapped shut like a clam. “She and your parents hunted monsters with me in the early 90s. From 1988 to 1995. Then your parents were... killed, in a monster attack, and your aunt broke away from our group to raise you and your sister. They were with me from the start of all this. And your mother… she was a dryad.”

Hollis stopped breathing.

“She was from a different world, outside of ours,” Mama said. “The planet Sylvain. Folks living here at the Lodge come from the same place, and were kinda like her - your average mythical beasts, vampires, werewolves, the Flatwoods Monster-”

“Stop.”

Mama raised her eyebrows.

Her words were rattling in Hollis’s mind; their ears were roaring, and it felt like someone was holding a cloth over their mouth. “A dryad,” they repeated.

Mama nodded.

“From another world.”

Mama nodded again. 

“And you’re all - you’re all monsters,” they said.

“Not quite, no. It’s a label that some folks’ve slapped on ‘em, but not what they really are.”

“Okay,” Hollis said. They felt as if they were on the edge of something - inches from knocking on the secret panel, revealing the hidden room. Some kind of unnamed panic was rising in their chest like bile. “And what’s the difference between the things like them and my mom, and the thing that killed my friends?”

The question was like a falling anvil in Mama’s office. Hollis felt the air settle strangely, in the wake of their voice.

“A hell of a lot,” Mama said grimly. “I’ll explain.”

* * *

She did.

In excruciating detail.

* * *

The puzzle pieces were slotting together.

Amnesty Lodge and the Pine Guard had been fighting monsters for almost thirty years, since the gate to Sylvain appeared in the woods in 1988. Sylvain itself was dying; most of its population had been wiped out, turned by a zombie-like curse called the Quell. 

It had been one of those twisted monsters - a Krampus - that killed their parents, the winter of 1995. They had no Krampus exhibit or Krampus books in the Cryptonomica.

Hollis’s mother’s dryad form was an olive tree. Leo had tried, and failed to save her. She died right in front of him. He carried no olive oil or olives in his store.

And Amnesty Lodge itself was swarming with Sylvan exiles, refugees, asylum seekers… it was a safe haven. It was a peaceful place, where folks could go to hunker down and survive. A place that had to be kept secret and safe, so that people could survive. Now they almost felt guilty, for doubting them - and more than pissed off that their aunt had never clued them in.

There was an entire world here that Hollis belonged to - a world they’d never been allowed to see.

At one point, Mama grabbed a photo album full to bursting with pictures; dogeared edges stuck out every which way, and one unsecured picture fell out. Mama scooped the picture off the ground and looked at it, a strange half-smile on her face. “Huh,” she said softly. “Would you look at that.”

Hollis craned their neck to see; Mama turned the photo towards them, and their breath froze in their lungs. They snatched the picture before Mama could even say anything. “Thacker took that,” she said, swallowing. “When you were born. Think that’s the only copy of the picture we ever got, we didn’t have a copier back in the day.”

They slowly pulled out their chair and sat down, looking at the photo. It was the inside of one of Kepler’s hospital rooms - like the one Bevin was lying in right now, unconscious; like the one where Cam’s and Alice’s bodies had been taken, before they’d been shunted off to the morgue. 

They swatted that image away, squeezing their eyes shut until colors swirled behind their eyelids. When they opened then again, they focused on the people in the photo: a tired woman in a hospital bed, holding a swaddled baby, grinning proudly while a man and a redheaded girl made faces at the camera. They flipped it over and looked at the back. Someone had written, in small neat capital letters:

_ The Wilson family: Liv, Drew, Pigeon, and Hollis  _

_ August 5th, 1995 _

The baby in Liv’s arms had a death grip on her thumb. Almost without realizing it, Hollis reached out and brushed their finger across the photo, lingering on their hands.

“I got more,” Mama said, after a long, long while. Hollis realized they’d been staring at the picture for nearly a minute. “Here, let’s take a look.”

She opened the photo album and swiveled it towards Hollis, nearly knocking over a stack of papers. Hollis peered down at the album. There was a faint layer of dust on the photo protectors; they slowly reached out to dust them off. “You wouldn’t know all these folks… well, never mind, here,” Mama said, pointing at one group picture. “There’s Liv ‘n Drew. This was the year before you came along.”

It looked like Halloween; they saw a crowd of unfamiliar people in costumes, grinning at the camera, grouped around what looked like the Lodge’s dining room. They were posed stiffly, as if waiting for the camera timer to go off; That shy man from the porch - who had a Chewbacca bandolier across his chest - was blurred in the corner, as if he’d started moving when the shutter clicked.

And there they were. The couple from the photo, somewhere at the left of the frame. Liv had a bunch of fake leaves glued to a green dress, plus long ribbons of super-realistic moss draped around her shoulders and head. Drew was dressed as He-Man. Hollis saw a blur of red hair in front of them: most likely a one-year-old Pigeon, fidgeting and squirming to be let down, to the point that they couldn’t see her costume.

“Your mom went as an Ent that year,” Mama said. “A bit niche, but we all appreciated the irony.”

“Dryad, right,” Hollis muttered. Jesus, they still couldn’t believe it. 

Mama nodded. “Liv, she was… great,” she said quietly. “Had her quirks ‘n all, mostly ways to cope with how different Earth’s magic is from Sylvain. Liv always felt a kind of buzzin’ in the back of her head, she always told us ‘bout that one -”

There must’ve been something in Hollis’s face, because Mama cut herself short. “You’ve been hearin’ it,” she said.

Hollis nodded.

“Yeah, that’d be the Sylvan part of ya,” Mama said, smiling faintly. “I’d have to get a hold of your sister, get her side of the story, but I bet it’s gonna be kinda the same. Y’all are always hearin’ the trees, kind of an ambient noise in the background of everything. Your mom’s strategy for dealin’ with that was to just.... open up her mind in the woods.”

“Right,” Hollis said skeptically.

“Just listen, hear what they’ve got to say,” Mama said. “Not really sayin’ anything, more impressions and emotions - that’s what Liv always told me. Smaller plants might work best to start off, the old ones always had much more to say.”

She paused, frowned at the floor. “She had,” Mama said, “a greenhouse, if I remember right.”

Hollis’s heart stopped.

“Out in the woods, northeast of here,” she went on, “there’s an old building that’s… kinda gone to seed, I wanna say. Hasn’t been touched in 20-odd years.”

“Well,” Hollis said faintly.

Mama didn’t seem to hear them. “It’s not much, and it might need a lot of work, but… your mother loved that building to pieces. She could grow anything anywhere, because… you know, dryad, but the greenhouse was a special place for her.” She smiled faintly at them. “After all this is over, y’all can -”

“Funny story.” Hollis cleared their throat, shifted in their seat. “I’ve kinda already moved in.”

Mama blinked. “You have?” she said faintly.

“Yeah, about four years ago,” Hollis said. “It’s a long story, but we know about the place. We’ve been using it, too.” They saw Mama’s eyes narrow and said curtly, “Last I checked, you didn’t need a license to grow tomatoes.”

Her eyes softened, in an almost pained way. “Y’all are really getting some use out of it, then.”

“Yeah.”

It didn’t seem like such a big deal to Hollis; the greenhouse had been theirs for long enough that it was natural, just the way things were. They’d always had a green thumb, and now... Jesus, now they knew why. There was so much,  _ so much,  _ that they had never known, enough to give them a headache - and they said so.

“That’s… Victoria had custody of the two of you,” Mama said. “Andrew was her brother, and she had a say in how y’all were raised. And I get it. I get she wanted to protect you, by hidin’ this all from you, but… I think she went about it the wrong way.”

Hollis was silent.

“It’s a miracle you grew up safe, still.” She sighed softly, looking down at the photo album. “Sometimes I thought she had the right idea, keeping you two in the dark. But I still wish you’d been able to know your parents. They were wonderful people.”

“I’m not them,” they said.

“And,” Mama said, looking up at them, “I’m not askin’ you to be them.” They looked away. “You’re you. You might be their child, but you’re a whole-ass human being on your own, and that’s the you I can get to know.” Her mouth twitched in a wry, humorless smile. “At least, if this war doesn’t get me before I can.”

“That’s fair.”

And the way she said that sank into Hollis’s chest like hardening concrete. War. This was a war. Their Hornets, their  _ family,  _ were casualties of a cosmic war they didn’t even know was being waged. That would never stop haunting them.  “A war,” they said out loud. “If it’s a war, where’s it being fought?”

“Here,” Mama said. “In Manhattan another. Time before that, can’t recall - think it was northwest of Denver. It’s been draggin’ back and back for centuries longer than either of us have been alive.”

“We’re the battleground, then.”

“Yes.”

“So in your battle plans,” Hollis said, looking at Mama, “did y’all ever have a plan for… the innocents? Casualties of war? Or were you gonna just… let them happen?”

“If there was a way to prevent those casualties from happening, we would have used it.” Mama’s face was lined with pain, scars leading from her jaw into her hair. This was not the face of a woman who had taken the abominations lying down. Hollis studied her for a while and, when her honest gaze became too much to handle, looked away. 

“I’ve lost folks too, believe me,” she said softly. “I lost a sister, my parents,  _ your  _ parents - friends of mine have suffered from the abominations comin’ through that gate for years. We’re doin’ everything we can to hold the tide at bay, but every single time a monster comes out, we're flyin' blind. And when it’s an entire planet that’s rotting from the inside out... we’re outgunned and outmanned in every way, until we find a solution.”

They said nothing.

“If you wanna be part of that solution - if you wanna lead your own family into battle - then by all means, we welcome you,” she said. “You’re all gonna need upgrades to hold your own, which we can give y’all, no problem there.”

How convenient it was, that they still had materials left over from rebuilding the greenhouse. They’d sorted through the rubble and hastily assembled what weapons they could. Nails driven through baseball bats; rebar with concrete still attached, forming a clublike thing; great steel pipes, boards embedded with broken glass. They made do. “Yeah,” Hollis said. “I mean. One of y’all can set stuff on fire with her mind. Can see why we might need to step up our game a bit. I’d be down.”

“Thank you, Hollis,” Mama said. She paused, fingers lacing together on top of her desk. “Is that - is that alright? Can I call you Hollis?”

“It’s the name my parents gave me,” they said, and felt uneasy with the way her face crumpled. “Might as well.”

* * *

They saw him almost immediately.

The moment they left Mama’s office, Hollis saw a bright blue windbreaker and a shock of blonde hair pass through a door on the other side of the Lodge’s main atrium. They immediately followed Jake; their feet sank into the rugs like they were walking on thick moss. He was the last familiar thing in this strange building - they gravitated towards him as if he was an acquaintance at a shitty party they both hated.

Jake was sitting on his unmade bed, with a sandwich on a plate in his lap. The spikes on Hollis’s jacket scraped faintly on the doorframe; he looked up, startled. There it was: that brief flash of orange in his eyes, before they settled back to their normal brown. 

“So,” Hollis said quietly, looking back at him without blinking. “What are you?”

Immediately, Jake’s face went white with fear. Hollis realized, in hindsight, that asking that question after rolling up to the Lodge swearing violent revenge may not have been the best idea. In their hand, their nail-studded bat started feeling like the weapon it was - like they were swinging around a flaming two-handed sword in a daycare. Hollis walked into Jake’s room, making a point to lean the bat against the furthest corner. Jake’s eyes followed them.

They slowly sat down on the corner of Jake’s bed - as far from him as they could manage. The mattress caved beneath them like a fresh loaf of bread; there were at least three down comforters on it, with three or four pillows. He always ran a little cold. Hollis wondered, briefly, what it would be like to slip between those blankets with their head on those downy pillows.

Jake’s knuckles were white on the sandwich plate. Hollis felt their mind starting to wander, sighed, and flopped backwards on the mattress, looking up at the ceiling. “So my mom was a dryad,” they said to the wood paneling. “Just found that out today. What about you?”

There was a beat of silence. Ceramic clinked on the bedside table. “A yeti,” Jake said faintly.

“Y’know what, that tracks,” they said, as nonchalantly as they could. “Mr.  _ Cool-ice, _ huh, super snazzy and inconspicuous. I love it.” Jake let out a choked laugh. 

They turned their head slightly and looked up at him, sitting at the other end of the bed; his eyes locked on them, glanced down and away. “You don’t have to answer this, if you don’t want to,” Hollis said quietly, “but… were you an exile?”

Jake cringed as if he’d been punched in the gut. Hollis wanted to apologize - but before they could, Jake nodded once. “Yep,” he said.

“My mom was, too,” Hollis said. “Did you know her?”

Jake shook his head. “I got kicked out after she died, man,” he said. “I knew about them, sure. We always - we always remembered her, and your dad, and all the ones who’d died fightin’ the abominations. Take a moment every year on their death days, and every November 18th. Nobody’s… nobody’s forgotten here, even if we never knew them quite as well.”

And they understood now. Jesus, they understood more than anything, why Jake had lived at the Lodge as long as they’d known him, why he always stuck with the folks here through thick and thin. The Lodge residents were his family - just like Hollis had their family in the Hornets. They had folks they would never forget, too.

And the two of them almost had overlap, there. Hollis stared unseeing at the wood ceiling. Jake could have been one of the Hornets. Hollis could have lived at this Lodge. And they wondered, lying in the soft expanse of Jake’s bed, how different things could have been if the dice had rolled differently, all those years ago.

Jake shifted on the bed; the comforters rustled. “You want a sandwich?” he said softly.

Hollis shook their head. “I’m good.” 

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Not that hungry, anyway.” There was a gnawing, bone deep ache in their stomach, just below their ribs, and Hollis felt as if it was building into a scream but never got the momentum. They swallowed; their throat ached with unshed tears.

They sat up, feeling the weight of the world on their shoulders the minute their back left the mattress. What they wouldn’t give to just sink down into it forever. “I’ve gotta go check on the kids and stuff,” they said, glancing at Jake. He’d put his sandwich and its plate on his pillow. “They… Mama told me everything. I gotta call them off before they -”

“Tear the place apart, yeah,” Jake said. Taking the words right out of their mouth, as always. Hollis felt a deep pang down in their chest, feeling as if two halves of something were scraping against each other, two broken slabs of earth grinding into place. 

“Wait.” 

Hollis realized that they’d nearly stood up, and froze. Jake scooted towards them on the mattress and put a hand on their shoulder. “Hey,” he said softly. “I’m glad you’re okay. I’m -” His hand tightened, almost painfully. “Fuck, Holls, I’m so sorry about Cam and Alice, I -”

Oh, Christ. That tenderness in Jake’s voice - that grief - it was so honest. It melted away that wall of ice they’d thrown up, in the wake of their friends’ deaths, and they knew in every fiber of their heart that Jake  _ meant it. _

“You know,” they said. “I’ve been. Last month.”

“Yeah?” Jake said softly. 

“When we saw each other up on the slopes, that day - and I said it was nice to see you again,” they said, smiling faintly. “I meant it.”

Jake’s mouth opened slightly. Hollis gently took his arms, moved it off their shoulder, and left to grab their bat in the corner. “See you, Jake,” they said.

They were halfway out the door when Jake finally spoke. “See ya,” he whispered. Hollis smiled faintly and headed right for the front door.

* * *

There was one last stop to make, before they went to round up the Hornets.

* * *

Ned had never fixed that back window.

The Cryptonomica was empty; only the display cases shone like luminescent fish in the room’s dark sea. Hollis let themselves in through the old window that never, never shut properly, ducking low to keep from snagging their coat on the window frame. Ned was nowhere to be seen. He was probably still out at the Lodge, and perhaps that was for the best. 

The hulking exhibits were like moonlit graves in a silent field. Hollis paced themselves through the exhibits, glancing at each one carefully before moving on. Ned had, obviously, expanded the Bigfoot exhibit; they paused in front of it, skimming over the posters and fake artifacts. They sneezed, loudly and without warning; this place had always been dusty. The floorboards rang hollow beneath their feet.

Hollis took their time to read each placard, resisting the urge to mouth the syllables to themselves. Hadn’t they learned to read, here, once?  _ Vampire. Naiad. Flatwoods Monster. Fairy. Bigfoot. Dryad. _

_ Dryad. _

They paused before the exhibit, taking it in with new eyes. There was a foot-tall wooden statue there, lovingly hand-carved and polished smooth. It had always fascinated them in strange ways, impossible until now to name. It was a tall, beautiful woman, her body the gnarled wood of a sturdy tree; her leaves were pointed and pale green, her branches thick and sturdy. Small round fruit hung from her branches.

She had the face of the woman in the photograph.

Hollis ran their fingers over the statue, feeling dust collect under their fingertips. They tugged their sleeve over their hand and gently buffed the statue; as dust sloughed off, the polished wood began to gleam like frozen honey in the dim lights. After a moment of silence, Hollis took a deep breath, feeling the ache in their ribs, and left the way they came: through that broken window that opened onto the woods outside Kepler, endless, dark and deep.

* * *

One thing led to another.

The next weeks dragged on in a panicked haze, as they drove off the abomination and tried to make their next moves. They weren’t able to kill it, despite their best efforts - just weaken it, drive it out of town. Hollis was itching for a fight all that time, wanting nothing more than to find the source of this pain and cut it right down to the roots.

But there was still work to do. They knew where the abominations were coming from. The Pine Guard, working with folks from Sylvain, figured out a way to repair the crystal and restore the heart of the planet. Problem was, the process of repairing it was going to bring every Quell-infested monster outside the city walls down on their heads. Someone had to defend the outskirts of the city, so they didn’t overtake Sylvain while the crystal was returning to full strength once more.

It had been humans who destroyed the crystal, to begin with. It was time for Earth to step up and fix what they’d done. Hollis and the Hornets had immediately volunteered to help.

That night, a month after the attack at the Hornets’ Nest, they geared up. They gathered their resources, their weapons. Hollis steered their Hornets into Amnesty Lodge’s dining room, where Mama had a smattering of old charmed weapons and cloth patches laid out on the table. She passed out the patches, while everyone else claimed weapons.

Hollis picked one up. It was soft under their fingertips, this patch: a green tree, silhouetted against an orange sunset. “What’s this?” they said.

“They’re charmed,” Mama said. She put a box of safety pins on the table. “Put it somewhere secure. Sylvain’s got a curse on it that drives folks from our world insane with rage. Not ideal. We give these to all members of the Pine Guard, human or not; they’re charmed to protect ‘em from the curse.”

“And they look cool,” Bevin said.

“Yeah, they look cool!” Tim chimed in. He was holding a concrete-rebar club that seemed strangely light in his hand, but still sounded heavy when he set it on the floor. Hollis grabbed the box of safety pins and opened their jacket, carefully pinning it in one of their inside pockets. 

The Lodge itself was seething with activity. Its residents were grabbing weapons, putting on body armor; Hollis saw a harried-looking woman stop in her tracks, pat herself down as if she’d forgotten something, and take off a ring, immediately phasing through the floor. She reappeared moments later, clutching a bag of something, and ran off to the kitchen. 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Jordan said faintly.  _ “Jesus.” _

“Yeah, that’s Moira,” that man from the porch said, coming back the other way. “S’cuse me, Hollis. Don’t let it faze you too much, she does that all the time -”

“Don’t you mean ‘phase,’ Barclay?”

Hollis looked up and saw Aubrey standing there, grinning at the man - Barclay - with her hands on her hips. Barclay pinched the bridge of his nose. “Get it?” she said. “Because she  _ ‘phases’  _ -”

“Yeah, I get the joke,” Barclay said wearily, patting her on the shoulder. “Alright, make way, I gotta go talk to Ned -”

“He’s in the bunker.”

“Natch, thank you - here, come with me, we gotta -”

“Yep.” Hollis leaned backwards, letting Barclay pass; the two made a beeline for a door by Mama’s office, tugging it open and clattering down a flight of stairs. 

A door slammed down a distant hall; Hollis saw a heavily-armed Agent Stern, in full FBI body armor, deep in conversation with a tall burly man with tattoos they didn’t know. Probably an out-of-towner. Stern himself was armed to the teeth with pistols, knives, a scary-looking gun or two. He was easily the most prepared out of any of them; everyone in the Lodge gave him a wide berth.

The crowd moved like interlaced machinery: everyone orbited around each other perfectly, knowing every room and every face like the back of their hand. Hollis felt as if they were standing in the center of a vast open field, watching the world from a strange and uncomfortable distance. Amnesty Lodge had never truly been for them. And yet, there was a long-gone life where it could have been.

Then the cellar door creaked open and shut. “It’s sundown,” Mama said, and everyone fell silent. “Let’s move out. Bring whatever weapons you need, and the stuff we need for the crystal. We gotta go.”

Their small army funneled out of Amnesty Lodge’s front door; at first they talked quietly among themselves, then whispered, and at last fell completely silent. Hollis left first and hopped on their bike, zooming off into the trees with half their team at their backs. They had already sent the other half, led by Keith, to the clearing Mama specified. The eight or nine of them were waiting for them, varying degrees of confusion on their faces. “Where the hell are we supposed to be lookin’, boss?” Tim said. “What’s -”

Mama glanced over, eyebrows raised. 

“Fair question,” Hollis said to her. Behind them, they could hear the rest of the Hornets, voices rising in confusion. 

“Hollis, what the shit -”

“The gate,” Ned Chicane yelled over them, his hands cupped around his mouth, “is right there!” He waved his arms in the vague direction of the clearing’s center, and then suddenly -

“Holy shit,” Bevin said softly.

Hollis stared. That crazy array of shadows they’d seen, back when they chased the abomination into the woods, resolved itself into a stone archway in the blink of an eye. “Well, that explains a lot,” they said faintly, and Keith snickered. “So, now what?”

Mama looked up at the sky, at the great expanse of frozen stars. “We wait,” she said grimly. “When the moon’s in the right place, and shines on the gate, then we’ll be able to go through. For now, though… we got nothin’.”

It was like the moments before an avalanche: tense, the air stretched taut and quivering in their lungs. Hollis put the kickstand down on their bike and looked around, feeling as if they were being watched. The Lodge’s residents and the Pine Guard were talking softly among themselves. That tall white-haired man from the campgrounds was standing at Duck’s elbow, eyes closed and head bowed as he listened to Duck talk. Keith and Jordan were whispering with Pigeon; she waved as Hollis’s eyes skimmed over her, and Hollis waved back. 

On a different side of the clearing, Ned was sitting on a stump, gnawing through a granola bar, while Barclay silently stood with Agent Stern, staring out watchfully into the woods. Even Leo was here, leaning on a massive broadsword like a cane. He was wearing a bulletproof vest with some metallic fantasy-esque shinguards. It was a hell of a look.

The one person nowhere in sight was Jake. Hollis had no idea if he was just stuck behind someone taller, or still on his way over from the Lodge - but either way, they couldn’t see him. They slid off their bike, making sure the kickstand was up, and drifted slightly away from the group.

Hollis skirted the edge of the clearing, craning their neck to find them. The further they went, though, something started humming in their skull, louder and louder - like whispers in a room, a sibilant murmur, just barely out of earshot.

They froze, on the other side of the clearing. “Hello?” they whispered.

The humming grew louder. It was like standing under the Pizza Hut sign - before it’d been knocked over, that is. Hollis’s eyes swept the woods, trying to pinpoint where it was coming from, but it seemed to be coming from everywhere at once - 

Oh.

A faint shiver went up their spine. Feeling all at once like a complete dumbass and on the brink of something big, Hollis swallowed and put their hand on the nearest tree. This was as good a time as any to see if Mama was right. If they were going to die out here, at least they’d get the chance to hear the trees. They closed their eyes.

The humming got louder, and louder, until it was all they could hear - not the folks on the other side of the clearing, opposite the gate; not even the blood pounding in their ears.

_ Hello?  _ they thought.

Silence. The buzzing stopped.

And then they felt an answering  _ Hello  _ vibrate deep within their ribs - not the words but the  _ sensation  _ of being seen and heard and greeted. Impressions. Warmth, kindness, love. A lump swelled in their throat, and they chased that feeling in their mind. “Hi,” they said out loud, their voice a wheezing whisper. “Jesus, uh -”

Presences, now: not just this tree, but others nearby, like they were all hopping on the same party line. Hollis felt warmth coat their soul, as the presences reached out and gently brushed their mind.

It was an impression, a memory of a memory they felt, passed along from mind to mind. But it was something all the same. The trees knew Hollis. They remembered their mother and father; Hollis felt fondness from the trees, admiration, a kind of exasperated motherly love - and grief, and worry. Andrew and Liv’s child was going off to war, weren’t they? Hollis’s parents had died among their roots - the same roots Hollis slept on for years; their blood had seeped into the ground and had never truly left it. And the trees had grieved for them, hadn’t they, hadn’t they hadn’t they  _ hadn’tthey _ -

It was too much. Hollis yanked their hand off the tree, chest heaving. The trees creaked in a gentle rush of wind, almost in worried apology. They slowly put their hand back.  _ You knew them, huh,  _ they thought.

A wave of agreement from the forest.

And then, after a brief pause, a wave of  _ pride.  _ Through the shape and colors and feelings, and a sort of deep heavy weight in their soul, Hollis knew what they meant, and the knowing -  _ what  _ they knew - almost made them collapse. 

The forest knew their parents, after all. They saw their mother exiled; they saw her garden; they saw her and her husband die. They saw Andrew and Olivia’s children grow up among their roots, making the world their oyster and Kepler their home, and these trees…

They were proud of Hollis. And they thought their parents would be, too.

Something thrummed in their veins, hot and boiling - something different, like liquid sunshine shot straight into them. This sensation echoed in them - it was just like, but far more intense than, the wave of life that came off their greenhouse whenever they went in. The feeling of standing under the trees during competitions, a swift rush in their heart, as if -

As if the trees were charging them up. Dryads fed off the energy of the land, Mama had said. Perhaps the trees were giving them everything they could, now - every last bit of energy they could spare.

Hollis didn’t realize they’d sunk to the ground until rocks started digging into their knees. Their hand scraped along the tree’s bark, fell, settled on an exposed root; the gentle hum of the trees’ presence spiked with worry. In the distance, someone called their name, but it didn’t quite register. It was all almost too much.

Their name, again. Hurried footsteps running across the clearing - to the other side of the gate. “Hollis.  _ Hollis!” _

Arms snaked around their shoulders, tugging them away from the tree. They took a deep, shuddering breath; the crisp air of winter and the scent of cedar wood filled the air. “Hollis, are you okay?” Jake said anxiously. “Hey, are you - Hollis, look at me, will ya?”

They forced their eyes open, and were startled to find that they were crying.

Jake knelt beside them in the clearing. Both arms were still locked around their shoulders, holding them upright; the heady rush of the forest’s energy was taking a long time to settle. Hollis tried to take a breath and choked. “Hey, look at me,” Jake whispered. “You okay?”

“Are they okay?” Pigeon yelled, alarmed. Jake flailed a dismissive arm at her, not breaking eye contact with Hollis.

Hollis just shook their head, tears streaming down their face. “I -”

Their throat stopped working. Jake was so close, his arms locked tight around them as if he was never going to let them go. Like the night after fred’s accident - the night after they’d killed an abomination in the woods, Hollis had found out, and Jake had been so terrified Hollis was hurt that he’d sprinted headlong through the woods looking for them.

“I’m fine,” Hollis croaked.

“No, you’re not,” Jake whispered, and gathered them close. “But you will be. It’s fine. We’re gonna be fine, Holls, it’s okay.”

And perhaps they were. Hollis finally gave in to the urge to cry and put their head on Jake’s shoulder. Tears streamed down his jacket. He just held them, comforted them for a long, long time, under the now-silent trees and the steadily whirling stars. 

When slivers of moonlight finally spread through the trees, Hollis heard someone clear their throat. “It’s time,” Leo said, in his familiar gravelly voice.

Silently, Mama lifted her arm; she held a small pocket mirror. She caught the moonlight and angled the mirror so it reflected onto the gate; the inside suddenly exploded with swirling light, and a sharp thrill of energy went through Hollis’s entire body. Weapons were raised, dirtbikes roared to life and helmets were put on. 

Hollis pulled themselves to their feet, dusting their pants off and heading for their dirtbike. It was time to ride off to war.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Hozier's "In A Week":
> 
>  
> 
> _"I have never known peace/ Like the damp grass that yields to me / I have never known hunger / Like these insects that feast on me_  
>  _ **A thousand teeth** / And yours among them, I know / Our hungers appeased / Our heartbeats becoming slow_  
>  _We lay here for years or for hours / Thrown here or found/ To freeze or to thaw / So long we become the flowers / Two corpses we were / Two corpses I saw"_
> 
>  
> 
> One chapter left. For real this time.
> 
> This took a while to get out because of the fiasco of episode 28 - which, holy fuck, y'all, if you haven't listened to it or you haven't gotten caught up with it, you need to. It's excellent. It made me physically hurt inside and I still haven't gotten over it, but it was so good. Writing some characters and scenes in here was hard because of it, but at least... now we're here. 
> 
> I hope you all enjoyed this chapter! Kudos and comments appreciated, as always; hit me up [at my tumblr](https://taako-waititi.tumblr.com) if you want to drop me an ask, be it about this story, the most recent amnesty episode, or whatever. Thanks for reading, everyone. Everything is going to be okay.


	5. Some New Beginning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by the official TSG playlist, plus the following songs, in order of appearance:  
> \- ["So Say We All," Audiomachine](https://open.spotify.com/track/1yGtwQmr4NRzftGOHU6vX2?autoplay=true&v=T)  
> \- ["Rebirth," MythFox](https://open.spotify.com/track/54HS3WURMscMBcdkpm3UQw?autoplay=true&v=T)  
> \- ["This Night Is for You and For Me," Danny Norbury](https://open.spotify.com/track/2eKgAvl8Ai1B0TKWvzTfpe?autoplay=true&v=T)
> 
> and the after credits tunes:  
> \- ["Mile Deep Hollow - Acoustic Version," IAMX](https://open.spotify.com/track/1X8iYVZACg3lYmnfd6A6fk?autoplay=true&v=T)  
> \- ["Honeybee," The Head and the Heart](https://open.spotify.com/track/22i86sVWNjLu7fttP4gA02?autoplay=true&v=T)  
> \- ["Lemon Boy," Cavetown](https://open.spotify.com/track/0ZTjo2BjVAicpu6LRusfeg)
> 
> If there are any typos in this, I apologize in advance, I uploaded this at work and it's the end of my shift right now and I had to clock out before I got the chance to proofread. I'll go back over this later and fix any glaring mistakes.

They came to the battlefield from every untouched corner of the land. They were not all soldiers. In the light of Sylvain’s dawn, they were just muddled, shapeless shadows - but as the sun rose they came into view. Some were human, seated on dirtbikes or hiking in on foot, wielding every weapon from baseball bats to swords to their bare hands. Some were Sylphs, walking side by side with humans; they held the weapons and wore the clothes of another world.

Some were soldiers, fighters, in all senses of the word. Military. A man in human body armor ensured the safety was on for all his guns, before entering the city. A man with the face and body of a goat directed Sylvan troops everywhere he could; he wore cumbersome and intricate metal armor that did not screech or show signs of rust. The ranks of Sylvan troops seemed thin - but not nearly as much as their allies from Earth. They were a sparse crowd.

And some peered through shuttered windows and heard the engines roaring, and saw exile and citizen and human walking side by side down Sylvain’s cobblestone streets. They saw the slow march - unimpeded by the guards, even _joined_ by them - to the center of town, and the thick black clouds rolling overhead, and knew that things had not just changed. They had ended.

With that ending came war, and with war came choice.

Some chose to fight.

* * *

They saw the dryads first. Hollis nearly lost control of their bike and had to stop, when they did.

A tangle of yellow-green oak leaves rustled in a nearby window. Two dryads, both so tall that they had to bend nearly in half to get through the door, strode into the street, followed by a goose-headed bird person who walked through the same door with ease. The sound of claws clicking on stone echoed from an alley to their left, and a rather large group of werewolves emerged from the shadows to join the march.

More kept coming and coming. Hollis caught Tim’s bike drifting slightly; he was gawking at a four-eyed tiger-person with large protruding canines, loping along with a massive sword strapped to its back. They reached over and tugged his handlebars away before he collided with Kellen’s bike. “Sorry,” he squeaked.

“Just be careful,” Hollis said. Tim nodded sheepishly and flipped his visor down.

It was easy to see movement in this dead city; the streets were empty, shadows clinging to every corner in the light of Sylvain’s early dawn, and they felt as if they would see a ghost shimmer into view in some empty window. The townspeople - those who weren’t coming out of their houses to join the group - seemed to be hiding from something, to weather the oncoming storm. Hollis heard thunder rumble over the roar of their engines; lightning flickered within the wall of black clouds overhead.

Their group split in the center of the city. Hollis stopped to stare at what was in the center of the courtyard: a great fifteen-foot-tall crystal, the pale barely-there orange of diluted Red Bull mixed with melted parking-lot snow. It called to them, but weakly; that last gift of energy from the trees burned in their chest like a bonfire, its tendrils curiously reaching out to the crystal -

“Uh… pardon me.”

The goatman sidled in front of Hollis; they raised their eyebrows at him. “You are…” He trailed off expectantly. His low voice sounded like he was talking with a mouth full of marbles.

“Hollis,” they said, extending a hand.

“Vincent.” The goatman shook it; his gauntleted hand was heavy and unwieldy as a bowling ball. Once he let go, he gestured at the Hornets and said, “We’ll need you down by the gate. The cavalry’s already mobilizing. If you have any more Sylphs or magic users on your side, we could use their help, but -”

“Wait - any _more?”_ they heard Andre say, confused.

Hollis heard some surprised cursing and whispering, in the Hornets behind them. “Right,” they said, eyes sliding to the rest of the Pine Guard. “I’ll... sit that one out. I’ll stick with my crew, we’ll meet y’all down at the gate when you’re done.”

Vincent nodded once. “Follow Janelle,” he said to Mama, gesturing towards a short, regal-looking woman with large glasses, swamped in several layers of clothing and wielding a nasty-looking battle staff. Mama nodded once, said something to Barclay that Hollis couldn’t make out. The Pine Guard and most of the Lodge residents started heading for the crystal at the middle.

“Pigeon, c’mon,” Aubrey said, tugging on their sister’s elbow.

She made a vague noise of protest, but Aubrey whispered something in her ear that made her face change. Pigeon swallowed once and backed away, joining the group that had broken off to head for the central crystal. She wiggled her fingers at Hollis, a panicked grimace on her face. It was as if she was saying, _“Magic?!”_

Hollis nodded once, touched a hand to their chest. They’d be fine. They would both be okay. _You got this,_ they mouthed. Pigeon nodded once, her mouth twisting into a pained smile, and took off after the Sylphs.

They’d see her again. They had to - they just knew it. Everything was going to be fine.

* * *

It was a straight shot along a single stone bridge from one end of Sylvain to the other. Hollis shifted slightly on their bike; the grooves between the stones that made up the bridge were hell on their wheels, and they could feel the road vibrating all the way up their spine. The Hornets rode in a surprisingly orderly line behind them. Hollis glanced in their rearview mirror every few seconds, just to make sure nobody lost control and fell off the bridge.

They had no idea where they were supposed to go, but the horde of Sylvan soldiers crowded around the massive east gate seemed to be a sign they were in the right place. Heads turned as the eighteen or so of them drove up; some Sylvans seemed scandalized at their loud, alien machines, but a few looked interested.

Hollis turned off their bike and switched off the headlights. Might as well save gas, before the battle; they were going to need it. They gestured at Keith, and he followed suit; the rest of the Hornets parked along the curb in neat rows, as if they were pulling into the parking spaces at the Hornets’ Nest.

Well, hey. At least they’d leave a good impression.

Hollis tugged their helmet off, shaking out their hair. “Hey,” they said quietly, turning to the Hornets behind them. They beckoned with their whole arm, waving the Hornets over. “C’mere, y’all, we have to talk about something real quick.” After a few puzzled glances, the Hornets drifted over, helmets placed safely on their seats or tucked under their arms. “So you didn’t have to be here.”

Keith’s eyebrows flew up.

“But I’m - I’m glad you all agreed to come anyway,” Hollis said. They gestured at the city gate with their nail-studded bat. “It’s a whole other planet, with folks you don’t know fightin’ a war we weren’t supposed to be part of in the first place.”

As far as pep talks went, this wasn’t the best they’d ever given. Hollis felt it slipping away from them and sighed, looking down at their bike. Their sponsorship decals shone oddly in Sylvain’s reddish dawn.

The little hornet sticker they’d put on the side of their bike was starting to peel. Hollis bit back the urge to start nervously picking at it. “I guess,” they said, “I just wanted to thank you all. For coming here, for sticking through to the end. We’re doin’ this for Cam and Alice, after all.”

Jordan nodded.

“We’re doin’ this for the ones who weren’t here to help us,” they went on. “I love you punks. I’m - I’m glad I’m not out here by myself. Thank you so, so much.

Silence. Hollis forced a smile. “C’mon,” they said, “we’re gonna do great out there. Stay in one piece, okay, ski and snowboard season’s not over yet.”

Thank God, that lightened them all up. They heard some soft snickers, saw a handful of smiles. Keith threw a companionable arm around their shoulders. As the others drifted away, Hollis nudged their helmet aside and sat sideways on their bike, smoothing down the peeling hornet sticker with their thumb.

* * *

It took an hour of waiting, in the cold stiff breeze under a roiling grey sky, for anything to happen.

There was a deep, percussive boom somewhere in the depths of the earth, as if something had exploded. Everyone cringed as a cold wind blasted outward from the center of town; clouds of dust slammed into the city wall and rose up as if trying to climb them. Hollis felt dust tickle their bare neck and popped the collar of their jacket, suddenly feeling very exposed and terrified.

“That’s it,” Vincent shouted.

Beyond the wall, thousands of voices let out a wordless howl. Shit. They must have gotten the crystal jumpstarted - and now, they had to buy the city some time, until it was fully healed.

“That’s our cue, get ready!”

The east gates of the city swung open, stone grinding on stone. In this moment, staring at the wastes beyond the city - seething with black ichor, swarmed with towering beasts and abominations straight out of their nightmares - Hollis knew there was no way that they could win this. This was the end of the world.

The gates stopped moving; their hinges creaked, and the final _boom_ they let out shook the earth. The near-silence after the gates finished opening was deafening.

Then thunderous wings beat overhead: once, twice.

Tim screamed and ducked, as the Mothman suddenly zoomed right over their heads like a passing fighter jet. His massive wings kicked dust into their faces. He pulled up outside the gates, crossed his four arms and gazed over the battlefield, antennae twitching. Hollis heard the whip-snap of igniting flame somewhere to their left: there was Aubrey, hovering slightly off the ground, fire rippling down her arms and over her clenched fists, radiant as a second sun.

Past her, they saw Barclay, fiddling with a hemp bracelet around his wrist - and then the bracelet came off, and suddenly a Bigfoot was standing there, looming over the surrounding Sylvan soldiers. He looked like the portrait in the Cryptonomica, certainly, but… kinder, softer, like the man Hollis had briefly gotten to know these past few weeks.

Hooves clattered on the city’s cobblestones; they turned all the way around, squinting through the dust flecking their visor.

A long line of Sylvan chariots, pulled by binicorns, approached the gate. Duck stood in the back of a chariot with Leo, wearing his skateboard helmet, both of them on opposite sides and wielding their swords. Ned sat in another chariot with Stern, both with their guns; both had them pointed across the battlefield. Mama and Pigeon cantered up on two more binicorns, wielding shotguns; Mama had a large sword strapped to her waist, too. And behind them, the waves and waves of Sylvan soldiers crowded against the city walls, weapons gleaming in the clouded sunlight.

Seeing them all gathered here, Hollis felt a strange swell of hope, despite the rage of the roaring hordes across the battlefield. They gritted their teeth and revved their dirtbike, feeling fear surge in their chest. There were answering roars from other dirtbikes down the line, echoing, echoing off the walls of the city. Next to them, Keith hefted his makeshift rebar club in his hand, the other gripping the handlebars so tight his knuckles were white.

And then -

“Hey, Holls!” Jake yelled, above the roar of their dirtbikes.

They saw him shouldering through the crowd, wearing nothing but some old jeans and a T-shirt; he’d shed his blue windbreaker somewhere. Amongst the heavily-armored Sylvan soldiers, he looked like a fragile plastic bag about to be blown away by a hurricane. He had no weapons, either. “Jake, what the hell?” Hollis said, not sure if he could even hear them.

Jake just grinned at them and hopped onto the back of their dirtbike. “Got room for one more?” he yelled into the side of their helmet.

His arms locked tight around their waist. Oh, Jesus Christ. “Always,” they shouted back. Hollis didn’t know if Jake had heard them through the visor; they settled for squeezing Jake’s joined hands, pressing them both into their stomach.

Their family was going off to war - but they were going to make it. Oh, God, they were going to make it.

At the front of their army, Vincent yelled something in a language that made Hollis’s teeth buzz - something ancient, suffused with a magical weight that sang to the energy stored in their soul. The Sylvan-driven chariots around them launched forward. Hollis revved their engine and took off after them.

They sped off into the wastes, keeping pace with the cavalry’s binicorns. Duck was cursing a panicked blue streak, clinging to the back of his chariot. Hollis saw Andre speed up and go over a hump, soaring into the air; a few other Hornets took the same jump, yelling triumphantly and waving their weapons. Hollis hit a similar bump and felt their wheels leave the ground for a split second. Jake squeaked something that they couldn’t quite hear, his arms locked tight around them like a vise.

They landed. Now they were close enough to hear the swarm of abominations, coming towards them; fireballs soared over their head, landing close to the hordes with explosive force. Bodies went flying. Hooves pounded the ground beside them.

“Barclay, now!” they heard Jake shout.

Hollis glanced in their rearview mirror and almost screamed. And Barclay, in Bigfoot form, was charging towards them like the T-rex in _Jurassic Park,_ supernaturally fast. Jake let go of them. “See ya, Holls!” he said cheerfully.

“Wait, no!” Hollis screamed. They looked frantically between Jake and the oncoming horde of abominations, which was coming closer by the second. “Jake, what the _fuck -”_

Their bike lurched slightly. When they looked back, Jake was gone. Moments later, Hollis saw Barclay launch him into the air, hurtling towards the abominations like a bright songbird shot out of the sky. Hollis held their breath.

Then Jake tore something off his wrist.

A massive creature appeared in midair, still falling towards the horde - something like Barclay, but much bigger and with all-white fur. It - no, he, it was Jake, it _had_ to be Jake - hit the ground in front of Hollis’s dirtbike, and they swerved out of the way. Jake tossed something at Hollis. It caught on their rearview mirror: a neon rainbow paracord bracelet, shimmering faintly in Sylvain’s sunlight. Hollis quickly snatched it off the mirror and jammed it in their pocket.

Jake ran alongside their bike towards the abominations; the ground shook, and they saw some of the abominations on the front line hesitate. Some even started to back away. Jake barreled towards them, seized the closest abomination - what looked like a grey withered husk of a satyr, oozing with black ichor - and tore it in half with his bare hands.

“Jesus,” Hollis squeaked.

“Hollis, heads up!”

Aubrey’s yell cut through the fog that had fallen over their mind. They turned in time to see an abomination leap for them, and skidded to a halt. “Thanks,” they yelled, hoping Aubrey heard them, and lifted their baseball bat. Fire surged through their veins, and they brought it down on the creature’s head. Its decomposing flesh fell away; it was like smashing a cake with a hammer. These things were like rotting zombies.

When they lifted their bat again, they saw that it had sprouted rows of large, clawlike thorns. Hollis grinned into their helmet. They clocked the abomination in the head again when it started to rise and got on their bike again, speeding into the fray.

* * *

“Bevin, what the fuck!”

* * *

“I got your back, ‘Drid, you take care of them -”

* * *

“Duck’s down! Duck’s down -”

* * *

“Stern, pass me a grenade.”

“Dani -”

“Just do it!”

* * *

“Stop, drop and roll, Keith! Shit, I’m so sorry -”

* * *

Hollis found Jake, as they always did.

He was impossible to lose on this battlefield; in his Sylph form, he towered head and shoulders above most of the abominations. Even if Hollis couldn’t see him, they could just follow the path of bodies hurling through the air back to their source. They blasted their way through a horde of Quell-infested beasts, limbs and heads and ichor flying every which way from their tires.

An abomination leapt onto Jake’s broad back and sank its claws into him. Jake’s knees buckled; he let out a wordless yell of pain and staggered to the side. Hollis angled their bike so they’d take a jump off a small rise in the ground; their bike soared through the air, close enough for them to clock the abomination in the head with their bat. It went flying.

Hollis hit the ground, skidded a bit, and drove back to where Jake was standing. “Got your six,” they yelled. Jake made a “hang ten” sign with his massive furry hand, and decked an abomination in the face.

That seemed to be his M.O.; Jake had never been one for fighting, as long as Hollis had known him. So when he did fight - like now - he just did what he could to get it over as fast as possible. Just winging it on the spot, like he did with everything else. There was no rhyme or reason, no targeting, no flips and tricks: just duck, cover, and smash.

Well. Whatever floated his goat. Hollis heard the telltale sound of bodies flying through the air and jumped off their bike, brandishing their bat. They sure as hell weren’t complaining.

* * *

When the crystal was back to full power, everyone knew.

It started with a single pulse, deep in the earth like a single heartbeat. Then another: stronger this time, strong enough to knock some Hornets off balance on their bikes. Hollis felt as if their bone marrow had been set on fire; they felt the song of the trees vibrating through their skull, up their spine, and choked on air. Behind them, Jake sank to his knees.

The pulses kept coming, as if the earth had become a giant drum that thousands of hands were beating upon all at once. Hollis slid to the side and fell off their bike. Their blood was burning; their ears were filled with dozens, hundreds, _thousands_ of voices, all crying out in triumph and joy.

And they could hear someone else, their song thrumming and bold beneath them all. Growing stronger and stronger, like a massive tide rolling in. The fire seething in Hollis’s chest burned even brighter, like they had stepped out into summer sunlight for the first time in years. All they could do was lie on the ground and stare up at the sky, choking on air as Sylvain woke beneath them.

A massive, white furry hand struck the ground, dug in; Jake dragged himself closer, and silently held out a shaking hand. Lying next to him while he was in Sylvan form - as the Yeti, they guessed - was like lying next to a tank. And yet, Hollis couldn’t bring themselves to be afraid of Jake.

The crystal was back. _Sylvain_ was back. Its power was like a mother’s soft touch on their soul.

As they grabbed Jake’s hand, a hurricane’s howl of wind tore the sky. Every single one of the abominations exploded into dust.

* * *

A breeze knocked loose dirt against the window. Hollis looked up, glanced around. The Hornets’ Nest was empty, on this night one week after the battle: a moon-soaked room, all crisp bluish shadow.

This place was almost never empty. More of the Hornets had been injured in the battle, and the Pine Guard had hauled them off to the hospital the minute they got home. Tim and Bevin had silently wandered down to the river, where it passed behind the Nest, and just sat there on a log, leaning on each other. Tim had a concussion and Bevin a broken toe, but they’d pull through.

Keith, as always, had rushed headfirst into the fray, without the barest shred of hope that he would even survive. He’d immediately gotten in over his head: took a blow to the chest, nearly shattered some ribs. Hollis could understand why he’d raced home after getting back to Earth: first on his bike, and when that ran out of gas, on foot, running desperately to the Owens house. He hadn’t gotten the chance to say goodbye to his family. Maybe he didn’t know if he would live to see them again.

And he had. By some miracle, he had. Keith hadn’t come back to the Hornets’ Nest since their return from Sylvain, but that was alright. Hollis just wanted him to be happy. He deserved it.

Hollis had Pigeon to return to. She was the first one Hollis ran to, when they dragged themselves back to city limits. They were limping, covered in blood and ash and ichor, looking like something that’d been pulled from an incinerator.

Pigeon didn’t care about all their blood and grime. She flung her arms around them, so tight and so close it was as if they were one person. They felt their ribs shift and their chest start to ache, but they didn’t care - they just buried their face in her shoulder and pulled her close. They’d almost lost track of her on the battlefield several times, and right at the end there they hadn’t been able to find her - but once they all crammed back into the city, they found her.

One of Sylvain’s ministers - the ones who’d survived - cornered them in the courtyard just before they rounded up their Hornets to leave. Curious Sylvan children were climbing over their motorbikes, prodding their crowbars and broken baseball bats and rebar clubs. Hollis tugged the keys out of the ignition so the kids wouldn’t get to it, turned, and came face to face with Janelle.

“Hollis,” she said.

“Ma’am.”

She extended her hand towards them; Hollis saw a glistening chain clutched in her fist, and their eyebrows flew up when her hand opened. Sitting in it was a shard of gleaming orange crystal, welded to the chain. “I noticed,” she said quietly, “that you have magic. Rather hard to miss on this battlefield.”

“Yeah. Got it from my mom.”

There was a resigned look in Janelle’s eyes, as if that was what she’d expected to hear this whole time. “That seems to be a trend around here,” she said wearily, and Hollis snorted. Just about everyone in the Pine Guard knew about the shit with the Flamebright Pendant and Aubrey’s mom. “Well - that being said, this could help you.”

“How so? What would it do to me?”

Nothing terrible, according to Janelle. It would help soothe their frazzled mind - that translator, that was constantly searching for input and never getting it in a language it could understand - it would give them some kind of inner resonance, so they wouldn't have to constantly retreat into the trees to refuel. Because it was the trees, after all, giving them nourishment and energy; it was the trees that soothed their mind and gave them peace.

“Only if I wear it?”

She shook her head. “As long as it’s on your person, somewhere.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then you’ll live life as you always have.” She paused, glanced down at their dirtbike. There was a flicker of curiosity in her eyes. “Though, of course, there may be complications,” she said. “Now that you’ve walked in the light of Sylvain, your body - your Sylvan blood - will yearn for it. It won’t be quite like what, say, Dani or even Jake have gone through. But you will feel some negative effects. Having the crystal will help stabilize you.”

“Hm.”

“And, also, you have a choice.” Janelle finally looked up from Hollis’s dirtbike. “If you so choose,” she said, “you can stay in Sylvain.”

Hollis clenched the crystal in their fist and slowly brought it up to their face, tapping their knuckles against their lips. They closed their eyes. The stone in their hands was like a hot coal.

Would they ever want to leave? Could they?

The door creaked open; Hollis caught a flash of color, reflected on the inside of the moonlit window, and their lips twitched in a smile.

They would never be able to get over how small Jake was, now that they’d seen him in Sylvan form. He was a little over five and a half feet now, but once that bracelet came off, he was easily over ten. Jake always looked like an average college kid you’d pass on the street - but standing here, in the Hornets’ Nest, he seemed to radiate… something. Power. Presence. Or maybe it was just the neon glow of his blue-and-pink windbreaker.

Whatever the case, he looked odd. Not out of place, necessarily; not as if he’d been shoved into this room, unceremoniously slapped on like a bumper sticker. No - it was like in those art restoration videos, where they scraped layers of dirt and grime off old paintings. The shadows of the world had been erased; it was as if Jake had been here, belonged here, all along.

“Hey,” Jake said, hands jammed awkwardly into his pockets.

Hollis tilted their head towards the chair across from them; he drifted over, shrugging off his windbreaker and draping it over the back of the chair. He was wearing a dark green, fading Kepler Ski Resort t-shirt. As the windbreaker came off, Hollis’s eyes froze on the crystal shard, just like theirs, hanging around Jake’s neck.

“What?”

Their eyes darted up to Jake’s; he was frowning slightly. “What?”

“Nothing. Uh.” Jake slowly sat down, scooting the chair a little bit closer. He folded his hands on the table, rubbing one thumb over the side of his other hand; Hollis felt their eyes being drawn to his rainbow paracord bracelet, and had to forcibly tear their eyes away. “You want a Capri Sun?”

“Yeah, hit me.”

Jake pulled one out of his pocket, and slid it across the table to them; it was still cold, as if he’d just pulled it out of a fridge somewhere. It sent a pleasant chill through Hollis’s fingers. When they stabbed the straw into it and took a sip, the sharp, sweet tang of cherries flooded across their tongue. Something twisted deep in their chest. Jake still remembered their favorite flavor, after all these years.

“So, what brings you out here?” they said around the straw.

Jake said nothing for a moment; he was busy rolling the plastic straw wrapper between his fingers, crushing it into a little ball. “I needed some time,” he said. “The Lodge is… kind of a shitshow right now.”

“Mm.”

“Folks are tryin’ to decide whether they should stay or go,” Jake said, “now that Sylvain’s back to normal. We exiles got crystals, in case we wanted to stay out here - reparations, y’know - but… it’s tense. People are still tryin’ to make up their minds. Plus the Pine Guard’s kinda…. not the Pine Guard anymore.”

Hollis thought of their patch, still safety-pinned to the inside of their jacket, and nodded. “No more monsters,” they said.

“No more hunting, yeah.” Jake sighed and sucked on his Capri Sun, looking vacantly somewhere over Hollis’s shoulder. “Dunno what we’re really going to do now,” he said softly. “Maybe if Sylphs wanna come over here on - on vacation or somethin’, I don’t know, Amnesty Lodge can help ‘em out. Maybe there might be more gates, or - or more wars. I don’t know for sure. I hope not. Things are gonna... have to go back to normal, I guess,” he said, and swallowed. “Whatever normal is, anymore.”

 _This is normal,_ Hollis thought. Jake sitting across from them; their Hornet family, safe, hurt but healing, alive. This _was_ their normal.

They didn’t realize they’d said anything out loud, until Jake’s gaze slowly slid back to them. “Is it?” he said quietly. “I mean, like. Shit’s changed, Holls. You’re - you’re -”

“Still me,” Hollis said. Their voice was a little sharp; Jake winced. “I’ve always been me, right from the start. Just because I didn’t get stuff sorted out until three fuckin’ days ago doesn’t mean things have changed. I’ve always been who I am.”

“That… yeah,” Jake said faintly. “That’s true.”

“Sure is. Can’t turn into a tree - _yet,”_ they said, sipping from their Capri Sun. The tension broke, and Jake chuckled. “But I’m getting there.”

“Wait, seriously?”

Hollis snorted. “No.” Jake smiled softly and shook his head, picking at a speck of crusted-on food on the table. “I honestly don’t know if I can, or if I should, but… it’d still be cool.”

They clenched their fist; the crystal in their hand dug into their hand, cast faint orange light between their fingers. Hollis opened their hand and gazed down at it; it was as if they held a miniature star in their palm, luminescent and warm. “That’s yours?” Jake said, pointing his chin at it.

“Mmhmm.” Hollis held it up, glancing between it and Jake’s. “Yours is bigger,” they said vaguely.

Silence. Jake made an odd sound like a whistling teakettle.

They looked up and snorted; Jake’s face was twisted up from trying not to laugh, but holy fuck, he really was failing. “Sorry,” he squeaked, breaking out into giggles and covering his face. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you just -”

“Well,” Hollis said, looking meaningfully at the crystal in their hand. Jake lost any semblance of coherency and broke out into full-blown laughter, putting his head down on the table. Hollis snickered and shook their head, sipping from the Capri Sun.

For a moment, it felt just like old times. They both seemed to realize this, too late; their laughter subsided, and Jake’s eyes darted away, staring blankly at a stain on the table. Hollis swallowed hard and looked out the window, at the moonlit trees marching off into the forest.

Then Hollis realized. A faint warmth stirred in their ribs: possibility sparking, igniting. Those were old times - and these were new times. These were reborn times, these were growing times, these were fresh, alive and verdant times full of new life.

They stood up. “Jake.”

Jake’s head jerked up.

Hollis said softly, “Put your jacket back on. Let me show you something.”

They held out their hand. Slowly, Jake reached out and took it.

* * *

They walked through the moonlit woods together, dodging trees and stumbling over roots. They passed the tree stump with the mooning garden gnome on it; Jake’s head jerked back to stare at it, but Hollis marched on, their hand like a vise around Jake’s wrist. He finally caught up to them; as they walked, their fingers interlaced, gripping hard. Hollis could feel the bones shifting in their hand.

Eventually they made it to the greenhouse, which towered like a slumbering, vine-covered elephant in the moonlit clearing. Jake let go of Hollis’s hand and made a beeline for it, staring at its vine-covered walls. His fingers skimmed over one of the rose bushes planted outside. Hollis watched the leaves sway in his wake, before they followed him in.

Inside, it was lit only by old glow sticks and Christmas lights: ethereal, twinkling, like stars pulled down to earth. Jake had frozen in the doorway, staring at the lush tangle of plants inside. Hollis gently nudged him out of the way and plodded down the center aisle, towards the cabinet in the back. Their fingers brushed over their tomato plants’ leaves.

They had reenacted this scene at least seven times. Seven new recruits: all united by the same path, the same cabinet of seeds and pots and books, the same rules hanging on the door, the same unity and love. But this… it felt different. Hollis thought of their hand encased in Jake’s massive one on that battlefield, as the planet beneath them final roared back to glorious life. They swallowed. Jake was different. He wasn’t one of their recruits. He was something else.

There was a ceremonial hush in the greenhouse, as if the plants were holding their breath, waiting for something to begin.

“What is this place?” Jake said softly.

Hollis walked forward. The pavers thumped beneath their feet; Jake followed close behind, staring at the rows of plants. They went right for the seed cabinet, pulling it open. A cool breeze, laden with the smell of old paper and fresh earth, drifted out. Its depths were invisible in the midnight gloom, but at this point Hollis knew how it was organized better than the back of their own hand.

They turned to look at Jake. His face was bisected by a beam of moonlight; his edges were erased by the night. They swallowed. “Pick a seed and a pot,” they said. Like they’d said to every new recruit who’s walked through these greenhouse doors. But this was different. Their voice was hoarse and choked with something they had always felt, but could never give a name. “It’s - it’s yours. Make it grow.”

Jake’s eyes gleamed orange in the moonlight.

* * *

Dirt coated his fingers and dug deep under his nails. Hollis lowered themselves to the pavers, sitting across from Jake as he worked in the moonlight. They didn’t have any fancy soils, gravel, or fertilizers handy - Hollis had never needed them to grow their plants, so why bother? Things near them just seemed to thrive.

They propped their elbow on their knee, feeling the low-hanging stems of their tomato plants tickle the back of their neck. It was early spring, now, but the tomatoes were ripe. Plants here never obeyed their typical growing seasons. They reached up and plucked one, slightly soft under their fingertips; the leaves brushed against their hand, which came away smelling musty and sharp.

Jake carefully pushed soil over the tulip bulbs he’d chosen. “Is this all?” he whispered, looking up at Hollis. “Wait - could you pass me the watering can, please?”

“Sure, here.” Hollis reached behind them and grabbed it; as Jake took it from them, their fingers brushed. “Tamp down the soil a little, maybe.”

“Sure thing, Holls.” Jake gently pressed down the soil, then poured some water on it. There was a faint crease between his brows. Hollis nearly wanted to reach out and try to smooth it with the pad of their thumb, but - “You’re not gonna eat that tomato whole, are you?”

“What, are you gonna try and stop me?” Hollis said tauntingly.

“I have another Capri Sun,” Jake said, just as Hollis raised the tomato to their lips.

They stared at each other in the moonlight for a few long seconds. “What flavor?” Hollis said into the tomato.

“Cherry.”

“...Tempting.” Hollis put the tomato down on the soil. They’d come back for it tomorrow.

Jake’s grin flashed in the moonlight. “Thought so. Here, don’t drop it.” He tossed the Capri Sun at them, underhand. “Respect the pouch.”

“Fuck yeah.”

Jake lifted himself to his knees and shuffled towards the table with the rest of their recruitment plants. Jordan’s green beans, Cameron’s spinach, Keith’s hot peppers, Tim’s poppies, Bevin’s cucumbers. He squeezed the pot next to Hollis’s tomato plant, carefully nudging its leaves aside so the tulip could get some light. The tomato stems kept flopping over the pot, despite his best efforts; Jake scowled faintly and reached for his pot, presumably to move it.

“No, it’s fine, you can leave it.”

“I got it, it’s -”

The door creaked open.

Hollis immediately froze. Jake dropped to the floor, tucked his arms close to his sides, and rolled under the cinderblock table like a log. “Jake, what the fuck?” Hollis hissed, lunging around the back of the table.

“Shh,” they heard him say softly. “C’mere -”

They heard soft voices: Andre and James, wandering into the greenhouse, wading through the dark. James’ arm was around Andre’s shoulder, cradling the shorter man close to his body. Hollis followed their progress down the rows of tables; Andre’s boots thumped on the uneven stone pavers, making them easy to track.

Jake tapped their shoulder. “Around the side,” he breathed.

In the distance, James said something about checking on his hydrangeas - that was good; his hydrangea pot was towards the back of the greenhouse, far from the single door. Hollis’s grip on the Capri Sun was so tight, they were scared it might pop. The two of them crawled on their bellies through the dirt and scattered fallen leaves.

Jake nudged the door open with his foot and crawled through, crouching just outside. Hollis followed and tried to close the door, but the hinges let out a loud creak. “Who’s there?” they heard Andre call.

They were halfway to their feet, poised to run - and they didn’t have to run, they knew that, Andre and James were their friends - but still, it was as if they had been sitting in blinding warm sunlight, and someone had unceremoniously dropped a wet towel over their head.

Then Jake grabbed their hand. With a soft, breathless giggle, he dragged them away at a full sprint. “Hey,” they heard James yell - but by then they were long gone.

They sprinted into the woods, leaves crashing, twigs snapping, a heady rush of midnight wind at their backs. Hollis felt the forest vibrating in their bones with every step; Jake’s hand was warm in theirs. And damn, he was fast - the shrill squeak of his windbreaker’s fabric was almost deafening, and Hollis nearly had to sprint to keep up. But the further they ran, the higher the moon rose, it became less about fleeing and more about the joy of running. The freedom. It was theirs, _both_ of theirs.

At some point the ground became familiar: the twist of roots, the rises and falls of uneven earth, the placement of stones. Hollis felt Jake drifting to the right of the path, slowing down, and let him. They knew this branch of the forest; moonlight fell in well-known patterns on the shadowed soil. There was their tree, among the ferns and undergrowth, towering high above them all.

Jake collapsed to his knees in that hollow between the roots, laughing helplessly. “Oh, man,” he said, covering his face. His chest heaved as he tried to catch his breath. “That was - Jesus.”

Hollis could hear the laughter in his voice; it made warmth pool in their chest. “Yeah, damn,” they sighed, plopping down next to him. “Really got my steps in, huh.”

Jake slid down the trunk until he was lying down; he winced and sat up a little, pulling a rock and some twigs from under him. Hollis picked some grass off their knee and settled deeper into the roots. Jake was warm next to them, like those old nights before the Daredevils, when they would fall asleep together in the embrace of the sugar maple’s roots.

Then they realized. Their hands were empty. “Shit,” they muttered, looking around for their Capri Sun; hopefully they hadn’t dropped it on their way here. There was a faint metallic gleam on the other side of Jake’s legs - it had fallen out of their hand and landed, unopened, between two roots. Hollis leaned over him to grab it, pressing nearly flat against his legs so they could reach.

Just as they grabbed it, they felt one of Jake’s arms snake around their waist, holding them around the stomach.

They froze.

“Hollis?” Jake said faintly.

“Jake?” they said, in the same tone, looking over their shoulder.

Jake’s eyes were wide and startled, like a deer’s. “Oh,” he breathed. “Uh. Sorry, I. -”

His arm wasn’t moving.

“What?”

“I thought this was a hug,” he said softly.

His arm slipped from Hollis’s waist and nearly fell away - but they grabbed his wrist. Above them, the wind rustled the leaves like a soft intake of breath. “It,” Hollis began, and stopped. They swallowed. “It can be, if you want it to.”

“Okay,” he whispered, his voice hitching. Jake’s windbreaker rustled again, and they felt his other arm tentatively settle on their waist, like a bird gingerly landing on a branch.  Hollis felt something sharp, something warm, blossom in their chest. “God, yes, okay -”

They swiveled on top of him, slowly adjusting their legs so they slotted even closer together. This wasn’t their embrace right before the battle, no - this was not meant to comfort. This was two puzzle pieces slotting together, after years of rattling around in the same box among thousands: this was unity, this was peace. Jake’s fingers drifted up and wound into Hollis’s hair; they felt the raspy grit of potting soil tickle their neck and fall down the back of their shirt.

It may have started as a hug. Perhaps it was just supposed to be one. But Hollis’s chest pressed close to Jake’s, and Jake’s fingers in their hair were soft and tender in a way that almost made them want to cry. They didn’t quite know where to put their arms; one looped over the top of Jake’s head, forearm pressed into the earth, and their foreheads brushed. Memory struck them: waking up five years ago, facing Jake in the morning sunlight, their foreheads barely touching. Just like now.

Jake’s breath hitched, and they focused in on him. “Oh, Jake,” they said softly. Now they knew what to do with their hands; they gently cupped Jake’s face and ran one thumb over his cheekbone. “It’s okay.”

Jake’s eyes were brimming with tears - but he was smiling. A shaky, wavering smile, tinged with relief and joy and a few things Hollis didn’t have the brain cells left to name. He nodded once and closed his eyes, their noses brushing. “Yeah,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”

Hollis felt his arm tighten around their waist, and gentle pressure from his hand on the back of their head. They gave in, they let it happen.

Jake’s lips tasted like strawberry kiwi Capri Sun and mountain air - like coming home.

They almost didn’t know where to put their hands: on his face, braced against the ground - hell, even on his shoulder or his chest, just _somewhere._ Jake sighed into their mouth. He lifted his head; Hollis quickly slipped their hand under his head and pulled him closer, their teeth scraping against his lips. They could almost feel Jake’s heart pounding through their chest, just from lying on top of him.

Hollis kissed him slowly, deeply; their legs tangled, knees bumping and hips pressing close. They felt Jake’s foot creep up the back of their calf; some kind of noise escaped them, breathless, wordless - it might have been his name. They had no idea. One arm snaked around Jake’s shoulders, burrowed between him and the earth, and they pulled him even closer. As if somehow they would phase together - they would melt like crushed wax in someone’s hand, ribs to lungs to heart.

Jake’s leg shifted, then, looping around their waist. His thighs pinned their legs; they felt him start to roll over. Hollis heard wind roar through the trees, building almost into static. Before they knew it, they’d both rolled over so Jake was on top of them; he was solid and warm, like a weighted blanket. He gently cradled Hollis’s head in both hands, his fingers weaving into their hair right against their scalp.

They froze for the barest of split seconds, still just barely touching. His breath rushed over their lips. Hollis finally, _finally_ opened their eyes. The depths of Jake’s brown eyes gleamed orange, like sunlight through fall leaves, still brimming with happy tears. He gently lowered Hollis’s head to the ground; they didn’t realize they’d been leaning up, leaning in, not wanting this to end.

“What?” Jake whispered.

“Don't stop,” Hollis whispered back. “Please -”

Jake dove down to kiss them again.

Their head knocked back against the earth. They could feel the dirt shifting under their head and roots digging into their back, but they didn’t care. God - it had been five years, it had been _five years_ since Jake had left them. Five years since Hollis let him leave - and maybe this was proof that that was wrong. Maybe, Hollis thought, as they kissed their way down Jake's jaw and to the soft skin just below his ear, feeling his legs wrap even tighter around them, this was proof that Jake had been kicking himself for that choice all along. Just like Hollis had been kicking themselves for making the Hornets a place where he didn't think he belonged.

But he belonged somewhere now. He was here. He was home. And Jake wanted this.

Hollis's teeth scraped against Jake's skin, and they hear him gasp - not in pain, but surprise. The trees snapped and rustled in the building wind. They kissed him again, there, and again, and as the grip Jake's legs had on them grew tighter, the space between them ever smaller, they moved. Hollis dragged their lips across his neck, slowly, tenderly, and kissed the underside of his chin right where it met his throat.

Jake _shivered._

“I missed you, Jake,” they whispered into his skin.

There was a soft, strangled moan that they could feel, vibrating in their teeth. His heartbeat pounded against their lips. Jake's grip on their shoulders tightened, so tight it was like being buried by an avalanche - and then he laughed once. A soft, breathless thing. “God, Holls,” he whispered. “I missed you too. I missed you, so, so much -”

He was babbling, now. Hollis grabbed the back of Jake's thigh with their free hand, tugging him even closer than before, and kissed him on the throat again. With an open mouth - and teeth.

Jake collapsed on top of them. _“Fuck -”_

* * *

Some plants do this… thing.

In the winter, the ground freezes and snow drifts down to cover the land, like feathers from a torn pillow. The world grows sharp and deep and dark, teeth of frost gnawing the soil. In the winter, some plants go dormant and slumber, waiting for the warmth of spring. Trees, grass, most perennials.

Five years was a long winter.

But the ground was unfreezing around Hollis’s roots; the sun was arcing through the sky. Spring was back, _Jake_ was back. They loved him like the grass loves the earth, like the trees love the sun - and maybe that was cliche, but fuck it. It was love, and something like that couldn't be crystallized into human words.

Their namesake was holly. According to the book they’d stolen from the Kepler High School library, that meant “hope” in plant language. And for once, they felt full of it.

* * *

Three weeks after the greenhouse, Jake’s pot of tulip bulbs started to sprout. Hollis watched them for a few more weeks, patiently waiting for them to bud and bloom. They were tempted to use their powers on it speed it along, but they stopped themselves. Some things had to take time.

When they finally grew, they bloomed in shades of red, white and pink, their nodding blooms bowed close like weary heads. Hollis looked at them for a while, the morning they started to show their colors, and went looking for the flower meaning book.

Tim had it. Of course he did. Hollis walked into the Hornets’ Nest and found him sharing a booth seat with Bevin, looking it over and muttering something about getting some apology flowers for Aubrey. Bevin had accidentally sideswiped her with his bike during the battle, and he’d apologized until he was blue in the face. Aubrey had accepted it, but he still felt bad, especially considering how she'd gotten really scraped up.

Well, at least they had their head on straight. Better than the time they got the passive-aggressive flowers for Muffy and Winthrop.  “Hey, Tim,” Hollis called out. They snapped their fingers. “Hit me with that, will ya?”

Tim looked up, startled. “Like, literally?” he said hesitantly. “Or -”

“Just pass it.”

“A'ight, Hollis.”

He slid it across the table to them; Hollis picked the thing up, glancing idly at the peeling “Property of Kepler Public Library” sticker on the back, and skimmed it. Freesia, gladiolus, marigold, rose -

Tulips.

There was a table there, describing the colors. Hollis slid one finger down the column, skimming over their meanings. Red: love. Pink: happiness.

White: forgiveness.

They froze, staring at the page. Their fingernail pressed hard against it until it turned white. Did Jake know? _Would_ Jake know?

Hollis stared down at the book for a long time, not noticing how long until Tim started to squirm in his seat. “Uh, Hollis?” he said

“Hm?” Their gaze slowly lifted to the window - through which the garden gnome was visible, pointing forever ass-first into the woods.

“Are you done?”

They slowly set down the book and slid it across the table to Tim. “Yeah,” they said. “Just… put it back when you're done.” Tim said something, but Hollis didn't quite make it out - they headed for the front door and pushed it open, cheerfully letting the screen door slam. Their bike was waiting for them in the lot, helmet sitting on the seat.

Hollis didn't mind being cliche. They'd drive out to the Lowe’s in Lewisburg, or maybe the Walmart in Summersville. Maybe they could get their hands on a red rosebush soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "Be" by Hozier:
> 
>  
> 
> _When the birds are heard again and their singing / And once atrocity is hoarse from voice and shame / And when the earth is trembling on **some new beginning** /With the same sweet shock of when Adam first came_
> 
>  
> 
> _Be, be, be, be, be / Be as you've always been / Be, be, be, be, be / Be as you've always been_
> 
>  
> 
> Holy fuck, y'all, it's done! thank you all so so much for hanging onto this story with me. I had the time of my life planning it, and I hope you liked reading it half as much as I liked writing it. as always, kudos and comments are more than welcome, or drop me an ask at [my tumblr](https://taako-waititi.tumblr.com) if that's your jam. thank you so much for reading!!


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